 And I like to do my presentations a little bit differently, so here we'll give it a try and see. Hello, I am Rick Jures and I welcome you to this presentation, Making Boos Do More. I have been teaching with Moodle since 2008. The universities that I work for do not run at Moodle, so instead I run it myself on my own virtual private server. I deliver 10 to 15 courses to approximately 450 students each year. We all want Moodle to look great. The problem is that everybody has a different definition of what great is. The solution to making your Moodle look great is themes, and there are three general approaches. You can design your own theme, you can use a third-party plugin theme, or use one of the built-in themes. The advantage of designing your own custom theme is that you can do anything, but the learning curve is steep and it takes time and money. There are many great third-party plugin themes that are equipped to deploy. The learning curve is shorter, but long-term support is sometimes questionable. Moodle's built-in themes provide long-term support, and you just pick the one that you want to use, but sometimes they do not look as great as you would like. I prefer to use Moodle's built-in themes. Prior to Moodle 3.2, I used more and modified it with CSS. I gave a presentation at last year's Moodle Mood about how I did this. See my website for more information. Since Moodle 3.2, we now have Boost, the newest core theme. It provides additional features, and there are new ways to apply CSS code. Boost seems to be the future direction, and I like it. My problem was how to make Boost look like my existing more. Here's how my more was looking to students, and here's how the new Boost looks. So my challenge became learning how to modify Boost with CSS. My strategy for more was to use the theme settings and the custom CSS dialog box. Boost is a little different. It has an advanced settings tab with two CSS dialog boxes and a general settings tab that has something to do with preset files and a few other settings. What I learned was that I can use Boost, raw CSS dialog box, exactly like the custom CSS dialog box in more. Boost also provides the ability to use a preset file where you can make changes to elements and add your own custom CSS code. I will tell you more about this later. So how does one do this? Briefly, you use your browser's inspection tools and probe for the element of interest and this associated CSS code. You make changes to this code, view the results. When satisfied, you copy the CSS code into the raw SCSS text box. Post on Moodle.org when you can't figure it out. Here's an example. I want to change the course font color to red. Using Firefox's web developer inspector tool, I find the element of interest. I look at its code, I change this to red, see that it works and it does, and then I copy this code to the raw SCSS dialog box. As another example, let's say I want to change the nav bar color. Again, using Firefox's inspector tool, I probe for the element and its associated CSS code and I make a change to it, see how it looks, copy this code, and then paste it into Boost's raw SCSS dialog box. I prefer my heading text sizes and line spacing to be a little bit tighter. Again, I probe for these elements, made some changes, and then copied this code into the raw SCSS dialog box. I didn't know how to change the background image, so I asked for some help on Moodle.org. Here is the code that I was provided and it worked. Preset files allow you to control the look of your Moodle through changing variables and adding CSS code. I learned to start with the default file and rename it to something that I prefer. As we look at the default file, we can see element values and CSS code. Let me show you. Here's my own preset file where I can change heading text sizes and here's where I add the background image CSS code. I load it into my Moodle's Boost theme, select it from the dropdown, and then save these changes. The preset file becomes a way to share the look of your Moodle with others. My method of using the preset file is that I first work with the raw SCSS dialog box, perfecting my code. I edit the preset file with the text editor, cut the CSS code from the raw SCSS dialog box, and paste it into the preset file. I save this, reload the preset file into Boost, and see that it works. Well, after 5-9 hours of doing this, times 10, here's what my Moodle looked like using more in Moodle 3.1, and here's what it looks like using Boost in Moodle 3.3. I am satisfied with the look of my Moodle and most of the new functionality of Boost. In summary, here are some of the advantages of my approach. I do use the core themes, meaning good, long-term support. It's easy to maintain and make changes. When I update my Moodle, this code persists, and it's easy for me to move the appearance around to other Moodles. Some of the disadvantages are that this CSS is still a little technical, and there is still a learning curve. What is fun to one person can be a pain in the neck to others, and the results are not as cool as some of the third-party plugin themes. As much as I do like Boost, I should mention that I do have a couple issues with it. In more, I was able to collapse these right-side blocks. Boost does not provide this functionality yet. Please vote for my tracker item. There has also been a lot of discussion of what should be in the nav drawer. I do believe that there is great opportunity to greatly enhance the nav drawer and make it become a valuable user-customized feature for surpassing competitor LMSs. Please visit my website for additional support to this presentation, including a default SCSS file, my preset file, my CSS code, and this presentation video. Thanks for taking your time to listen to my presentation.