It’s been a long time coming but finally Moodle is now truly mobile friendly – out of the box! The hotly anticipated release of Moodle 2.5 next month will see a number of major features coming our way, including the new Bootstrap theme.
Over the years, various attempts have been made to build Moodle native apps, which led to a lot of developers focusing on building mobile web services into Moodle to communicate with such apps. Support was also built in for device-specific ‘themes’, and previous versions of Moodle come shipped with the My Mobile theme which can be setup to display on tablet and smartphone devices. But none of these approaches was ideal and the user experience across devices was inconsistent.
Enter Bootstrap, which can be used as your site’s default theme and is fully responsive. This means it resizes gracefully for desktop, tablet and smartphone users and thus provides a consistent web-based user experience across all device types. For the Moodle mobile experience, Bootstrap has quite simply nailed it.
Out of the box, your Moodle 2.5 with Bootstrap enabled will look like the following:
Obviously this hasn’t been jazzed up with any images or branding, but you can how the course layout changes smoothly. Any top level navigation is available by clicking on the menu button, and all blocks automatically move underneath the main content so the most important information is available on-screen rather than having to scroll down to find it the content.
Bootstrap has been available as a Moodle plugin for some months already, but Moodle 2.5 will make this the default theme. And as with all base Moodle themes, Bootstrap is meant to be built on rather than used ‘as is’. At Epic, we have been using it as our standard base theme for all new projects for a few months now, so that even our most basic Moodle offering is now multi device friendly.
Bootstrap is a fantastic addition to Moodle and brings it bang up to date with what users expect of web applications in 2013.
Are you interested in rolling out multi device learning to your Moodle? Contact us for more information on how we can help you implement Bootstrap.