Ugly category names on front page? Pimp it!

Did you ever take a look at your Moodle front page and thought: "This looks bad, lame textual category names everywhere, it's so boring" ?

You can change that easily and add some appropriate images instead of dull category names.

• turn on Include topic section (see here how - don't forget to turn off displaying old categories list)


• create or update Label in topic section on the front page


• create or download some fancy icons, web is full of them (search www.iconarchive.com, use www.iconfinder.net, www.webappers.com has nice selections or just Google it :-) )


• add icons into created Label


• place them into html table or use css to position them correctly
  


• select icon and Insert weblink with url to selected category to it


• save changes

With little effort you can create beautiful Moodle front page. See examples here and here

Idea from http://www.edugeek.net forum, icons used in my examle: Lord application icon by FixIcon

Moodle failed my trust

I read today this blogpost about author's experience with "overwhelming" teachers with Moodle rich features on the training, on the presentations, just to confuse or even scare them..

I found I am guilty with that too ;-).

But another idea crossed my mind. Did you ever "hype" some Moodle feature that didn't work as you expected later? Did you say to yourself: "Oh man, I wish I have never installed this, I wish I have never spoken about that, this is so much pain in ...". Did you ever regret you went with Moodle?

This article is not about blaming Moodle, unfortunate events happen all the time everywhere. I am just interested in situations, features that didn't go well or as you planned and how did you solve that? I love happy endings ;-).

I am looking forward to your comments :-).

Alfresco and Remote-Learner.net Partnered

I am more and more looking into Java language and CMS Alfresco, that is very powerful as a repository, content version tracking system etc. and I am glad to hear, that Alfresco is going to collaborate with Moodle more (see Alfresco tie-in in Moodle 2.0 on moodleman.net blog ).

Today I found that Alfresco made a connection with a Remote-Learner.net, who is a provider for Open source e-learning solutions, Moodle partner by the way, and together they will provide new Enterprise Learning Intelligence Suite for Moodle (ELIS) that, I hope, will solve some problems with content sharing, content management and security Moodle is having.

And here is a LINK where I found this news.

How is Moodle developing?

Did you ever wondered, how it is going in Moodle development? What is being done right now, when you will be able to try new features?

I found today on moodleman.net (btw really fine blog) link to Google doc with constantly revised Moodle development planning.

So take a look, it is really interesting and it will put you in the picture, how much work Moodle is ;-).

LINK