Forums | E-Learning Practitioners

21 July 2014, 19:07

We have noticed some outstanding issues with this upgrade – please read this post carefully as these issues are like to affect you - http://www.elearning.capd.qmul.ac.uk/articles/qmplus-post-upgrade/.

23 July 2014, 18:39

Thanks Manoj. On the whole the upgrade has been a relatively painless process from this School's perspective (English and Drama), which is great.

I have inevitably noticed some styling issues with the upgraded QMplus that are not mentioned on this post, and that I thought I'd circulate:

• problems with HTML tables not rendering properly in books and pages (they seem set to display as 'block' rather than 'table') -- this is making some of our content invisible at present
• loss of some heading styles, e.g. the distinctive h3 banner styling which I used a lot and thought was quite effective for highlight sections on long pages
• the width of the left and right columns, which take up too much screen-estate in relation to the real content in the centre (I know this is a known-issue, and is related to the responsive design that is welcome in itself
• the loss of the QMplus dock for blocks (I'm sure this is also a known issue)

Best wishes,

Richard

24 July 2014, 12:54

Dear Richard

Thanks for your email. As I am working on the design/theming usability of the upgrade of Moodle and Mahara I thought I'd come in here and give you a update about what is happening behind the scenes to resolve many of the issues you identify.

1. There is indeed a problem with rendering of tables in the upgrade. This is due to the fact that we have moved to what is called a 'responsive' theme. Making pages responsive has meant a complete rework of the theme. Tables do not work particularly well if they have been given fixed widths.  There is a potential solution posted on Moodle.org :https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=260248

My advice in this area is that you should not use tables for design purposes. If there are particular layouts you would like to achieve that are not offered amongst the styles we offer then get in touch with your specific requirements. If you are using tables for tabular data, try the tips in the link above.

2. Heading styles have been ever-so-slightly modified. The biggest change across the whole site has been the removal of the bold headings in many places to produce a more elegant feel. The display of H3 headings is currently incorrect because we have been experiencing problems with getting theme updates on live. I will give you a couple of screengrabs showing you what we expect the headings to look like in Collapsed topics (qmul) and topics (qmul) formats. As you can see there are now a range of upper and lowercase options. H3 is now underlined and there are some colour variants if you pop into the html and add a class . (I have provided a list of those classes underneath.

Link 1 (topics format(qmul): http://mahara.qmul.ac.uk/artefact/file/download.php?file=113702
Link 2 (collapsed topics (qmul): http://mahara.qmul.ac.uk/artefact/file/download.php?file=113701

Styles for these headings are:

<h1>Header 1</h1>
<h2>Header 2</h2>
<h3>Header 3</h3>
<h4>Header 4</h4>
<h5>Header 5</h5>
<h6>Header 6</h6>
<h2 class="lowercase">Header 2 lowercase</h2>
<h2 class="lowercase"></h2>
<h2 class="darkblue">Header 2 dark blue</h2>
<h2 class="lightblue">Header 2 light blue</h2>
<h3 class="lowercase">Header 3 lowercase</h3>
<h3 class="darkblue">Header 3 dark blue</h3>
<h3 class="lightblue">Header 3 light blue</h3>

So my advice is, if you like the style you are using don't change it. The theme will correct itself when we do the update in mid August.

3. The column width was indeed too large and therefore I have already redone it. This was not an easy task as it affects the responsive 'grid'. The size you see is at 23% of the browser window. It has now been reduced to 18% and I hope you will agree...has a much better feel to it..privileging content over blocks...if you like! This screengrab of one of your courses gives you a feel:

 Link 3 (new block layout): http://mahara.qmul.ac.uk/artefact/file/download.php?file=113703

This update will also be in the mid-August release.

4. Not being able to 'dock' is so sad..I really need it. It is a known issue.

5. There are a number of other theme tweaks that will go into the next release including the visibility of the 'crosshair' for moving topics around in collapsed topics, the fixes to school landing page code.

6. In early September we will be doing a more interesting design update where we are planning to refresh the homepage, revamp the way news is delivered to the homepage and school landing pages and adding a zoom button to pages (knocking out nav to make them easier to view).


I hope this info helps.
 
Regards

Brett

24 July 2014, 16:24

Dear Brett

Thanks, this information is much appreciated. I know how busy you are, but it's really helpful to have this context.

1. On HTML tables: We don't want to use tables for underlying design purposes, but rather to present tabular information. The issue isn't with fixed dimension tables (if and where they exist we'll need to get rid of them now QMplus is responsive), but with all tables. The HSS display attribute for tables is now set in the stylesheet to 'block' rather than 'table', and we don't understand why. This has made all our Moodle Database templates unreadable (by a user), for example. You can reinstate "display: table," locally via the HTML editor, and then things render as we'd want, and remain fully responsive (to the untrained eye at least).

Here's an example of where we've added the display: table attribute: http://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=309323&chapterid=25408

And one where we haven't: http://qmplus.qmul.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=222366&chapterid=11522

2. Headings: great, really helpful.

3. Column dimensions look much better when they're reduced -- thanks for persisting with this.

4. I too am sad about the dock.

5/6. Looking forward to more soon.

Kind regards,

Richard

24 July 2014, 15:06

Thanks Manoj,

The new QMplus is looking great.  I thought I'd add a bug which I noticed again today in Brett's very helpful reply to Richard's message.  (I've reported it to the Helpdesk, but thought I'd add it here too, so other people don't have to spend the time reporting it again).

Emails generated by the Forum tool in Mahara seem to be inserting random spaces, see the image below.  The spaces aren't there in the forum posts.