What do users who are logged in see?

Let us log in and note the difference in the Navigation block (I've undocked it for ease of viewing).

What do users who are logged in see?

Basically there are five links here:

  • Home: This directs us to our front page.
  • My home: This takes us to our myMoodle page.
  • Site pages: This is where we can access site news, items on the front page, blogs, and tags. Users with higher permissions can also access reports and notes from here.
  • My profile: Here we can quickly view or edit our profile.
  • Courses: Here we can select a course to go to.

As the Navigation block is a "sticky" block in all my courses (we will learn more about sticky blocks later), it means that wherever I am in Moodle I can quickly access my profile details, move to a different course, or go back to the front page or myMoodle. Let's check out these links in more detail.

Home/My home

It is possible to set the default home page for users who are logged in to myMoodle, instead of the front page in Site administration | Appearance | Navigation. We'll look into this in more detail in Chapter 8, Admin Issues when looking at admin issues. If we did that, our block would look as shown in the following screenshot:

Home/My home

If I click on My profile to view my details, you can see how the navigation bar works. We can see the top bar when Home is our Moodle front page; and we can see the bottom bar if we're using myMoodle as our logged in home page:

Home/My home

Site pages

What we see when we click on Site pages depends on our permissions on the site. For example; I, as the administrator with front page powers can see the view on the left as shown in the following screenshot, whereas our student Emma and her two teachers, Stuart and Andy can only see the Blogs, Tags, and Site news links on the right.

Site pages

My profile

Again, note the differences between what I (as admin) see (on the left) and what regular users like our student Emma see (on the right). We'll deal with Private files and Repositories, as shown in the following screenshot, later in the book.

My profile

If we click the View profile link, our profile appears in the main screen but it also summons another block with settings for editing the profile. Emma's profile is shown in the following screenshot:

My profile

Note

We're going to see this often as we navigate around Moodle 2.0. Selecting a feature or activity will bring up a dedicated area in a Settings block enabling us to customize our choice.

My courses

We'll shortly take a look at how moving around a course has changed. This is the link to go to the courses we teach or study in.

Note

It is also possible from Site Administration | Appearance | Navigation to have all courses or course categories shown in the block along with our individual courses. This will be covered in Chapter 8, Admin Issues.