Ever wished you could easily differentiate your Moodle courses visually based on their categories? Imagine if all your “Guitar Courses” had a specific heading color, or your “Admin Courses” sported a unique background. The good news is, you can! This blog post will show you how to apply custom CSS styles to your Moodle categories, transforming your course pages into a more intuitive and visually appealing experience.
Understanding Moodle Categories and IDs
Before we dive into the styling, let’s understand how Moodle categorizes courses. Each course belongs to a specific category, and crucially, each category has a unique ID. You can find these IDs by navigating to “Courses and Categories” in your Moodle admin area. As you hover over each category, its ID will appear in the bottom left corner of your browser. For example, “Miscellaneous” might be category ID 1, “Admin Courses” category ID 2, and “Guitar Courses” category ID 3. These IDs are the key to targeting specific categories with our custom CSS.
Where to Apply Your Styles: The Body Class
Moodle conveniently adds a unique class to the <body> tag of each course page, reflecting the category it belongs to. For instance, if a course is in Category 3, the body class will include “category-3”. Similarly, a course in Category 2 will have “category-2”. This “category-X” class is what we’ll leverage to apply our custom styles.
The Power of Advanced CSS in Moodle
To add our custom CSS, we’ll head to your Moodle admin panel, then navigate to “Appearances” > “Themes” > “[Your Theme Name]” (e.g., Boost theme) > “Advanced Settings.” Here, you’ll find a section for custom SCSS (Sass CSS). SCSS is a preprocessor for CSS, offering more advanced features like variables and loops, which will be incredibly useful for our task.
Simplifying Styling with Loops
While you could manually write CSS for each category (e.g., .category-1 h1 { color: red; }, .category-2 h1 { color: blue; }), this quickly becomes cumbersome. A more efficient approach, especially with SCSS, is to use loops and arrays to define your styles.
Here’s a simplified example of how you can achieve this:// Define an array of primary colors for your categories
$category-primary-colors: (
1: teal, // Category 1
2: orange, // Category 2
3: purple // Category 3
);
// Define an array of secondary colors for your categories
$category-secondary-colors: (
1: black, // Category 1
2: pink, // Category 2
3: teal // Category 3
);
// Loop through your categories to apply styles
@for $i from 1 through 3 { // Adjust the '3' to match your highest category ID
.category-#{$i} { // Targets the specific category body class
.page-content { // Target content within the page
h3 {
color: map-get($category-primary-colors, $i);
margin-top: 20px;
margin-bottom: 20px;
border-bottom: 1px solid map-get($category-primary-colors, $i); // Add a bottom border
}
h4 {
color: map-get($category-secondary-colors, $i);
}
}
}
}Code language: PHP (php)Explanation:
- $category-primary-colors and $category-secondary-colors: These define lists of colors, mapped to your category IDs. You can customize these colors to your liking.
- @for $i from 1 through 3: This loop iterates from category ID 1 to 3 (adjust 3 to your highest category ID).
- .category-#{$i}: Inside the loop, this dynamically generates the category class (e.g., .category-1, .category-2).
- h3 and h4: These target specific heading levels within the course content.
- map-get($category-primary-colors, $i): This retrieves the corresponding color from your defined arrays based on the current category ID in the loop.
- border-bottom: You can add other CSS properties, like borders, background images, or font styles, to further customize your categories.
Seeing the Results
After saving your changes in Moodle, refresh your course pages. You’ll instantly see the impact of your custom CSS! Courses belonging to Category 3 might now have purple H3 headings with a matching border, while Category 2 courses display orange H3s.
This method allows you to:
- Globally change styles: Update colors or other properties in one place, and it applies to all courses within that category.
- Maintain consistency: Ensure a unified visual identity for all courses within a specific category.
- Enhance user experience: Make it easier for users to distinguish between different course types at a glance.
By leveraging Moodle’s category IDs and the power of SCSS, you can significantly enhance the visual appeal and organization of your Moodle courses. Experiment with different colors, fonts, and other CSS properties to create a truly unique and branded learning environment!