- Moodle 2.0 First Look
- Mary Cooch
- 613字
- 2025-02-24 10:21:15
Let's remind ourselves of what our front page looks like; it should look as shown in the following screenshot:
We see that there is a handy calendar on the right. A Moodle calendar will display site-wide dates of importance, events, and deadlines for classes or groups and can, of course, serve as a handy memory-jogger for individual users. This would be a valuable block to have everywhere on our Moodle site, so how do we go about achieving that and making the calendar block "sticky"?
We need to be admin on Moodle, as only the administrator can make blocks "sticky" everywhere. If we want to have an instance of the calendar block everywhere we need to head for one of the administration pages that are available from the Site administration link. We will add the calendar block to one of those pages and then make it sticky from there:
- Go to the Notifications page (for example) and turn on the blocks editing on the top right
- Select Calendar from the add a block drop-down menu
- Click on the configuration icon (usually a hand/pen), as shown in the following screenshot:
- This will bring up the following screen:
The Page contexts drop-down shows the following:
We're obviously choosing to Display throughout the entire site.
The Restrict to these page types drop-down list shows the following:
The asterisk * is a "wild card" character that represents any instances of that page. So if we select admin *, then the block will appear on any page with admin in the url (such as the Browse list of users page) However, if we choose the asterisk * (Any page), the block will then appear on all pages of our Moodle.
Default region allows us to choose whether the block will appear on the right or the left and weighting offers us a number to determine its position (importance) on the page where -10 is at above all other blocks and +10 is underneath all other blocks. If two blocks happen to have the same weighting, then the order is effectively random.
On this page gives us the choice of customizing how we want the block to appear on the page we are currently viewing - or indeed, if we don't want it to appear at all, by choosing visible (no)!
Note that (as we saw when clicking on View Profile) now we've opted to edit the Calendar block, we can perform extra actions in the Settings block:
If we save the settings for our Calendar block and then go back to Stuart's French course, we see he's now got a useful Calendar block on the top right of his course page:
One important aspect to note in the preceding screenshot is that, although our teacher Stuart has editing permissions to hide, configure, or move the calendar, he does not have the usual delete icon (X) because it was made "sticky" by the administrator. If he clicks on the configure (pen/hand) icon all he can do is alter the calendar's visibility, location, and weighting on this actual page.
Note
In the preceding example, we already had an instance of the Calendar block on our front page. Once we made the Calendar block "sticky" we will have two calendars on the front page, so we would need to go and delete the first one. This is something to bear in mind when an administrator adds a block site-wide that might already be present in a course or on the front page.