Titus Roadmap
See what's coming up in the Titus product roadmap
For an overview of the dashboard watch the adjacent video from Product Lead, Edd Clementson.
❓ About the Portal
Welcome to the Titus product roadmap area.
It is here where we hope to keep you updated on changes to our key products. Over time, this area will contain more information. Any feedback we receive to improve this experience, is greatly appreciated.
Product Lead – Edd Clementson
The LMS theme portal has been created to showcase the Moodle LMS 4 theme and portray ideas and enhancements for the future.
It has been introduced as an opportunity for clients and prospects to not only vote on ideas and express how important and useful they could be, but also submit new ideas for review and approval by the Titus team and wider customer base.
To submit a new idea for the Moodle LMS 4 theme, please provide as much detail and context as possible, to help us understand your requirement. This button can either be found at the top right of this portal (larger resolution screens):
Or at the bottom left of the portal (hiding behind the 🍪 cookies popup!)
We hope you find this portal useful in viewing upcoming features and areas that we may work on for the theme. Any feedback is greatly appreciated!
📝 LMS 4 Theme Release Highlights
🚀 ‘Thor’ – V1.0.0 (September 2022)
Like the mighty Thor and his hammer, Titus are proud to announce the forging of a new phenomenal eye-catching Moodle theme plugin.
Building on top of the upgraded foundations in Moodle 4.0, Version 1.0.0 ‘Thor’ introduces an array of options and styling choices for 4 key areas of the Moodle LMS 4 platform, the ‘Site home’, Dashboard, ‘My courses’ & the course homepage.
Titus recommend using the Softcourse or Designer course formats, followed by Tiles format, for use with the Titus theme.
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
This initial release focusses on some of the fundamental areas within the Moodle interface that we and our clients felt needed modernising. Many improvements were made in Moodle 4.0 to improve the user experience and interface and we’ve worked hard to enhance these further.
Our initial aim was to focus on the most heavily used areas of the platform, alongside introducing an array of customisation options across these areas, to ensure each platform can be branding easily by administrators.
We value the importance of an aesthetically pleasing learning platform and would love your feedback on this first release.
⚡ Highlights
- – Re-envisioned site home page
- – Updated ‘My Courses’ page
- – Dashboard – Updated block styling
- – Course page improvements – styling changes to ‘Softcourse’ format
- – Alignment of navigation elements such as top nav bar items (notifications, messaging etc).
- – Introducing of site admin ‘Quick links’
- – Huge array of customisation options offered in theme settings for greatly enhanced branding
🎁 What’s inside?
🏠 ‘Site home’ page
A number of brand new features and functionality has been introduced to the ‘Site home’ page (formerly known as the ‘Frontpage’). This includes:
- – Slideshow
- – Shortcuts
- – Marketing tiles
- – Site announcements
- – Available/enrolled courses
📚 ‘My courses’ page
The ‘My courses’ page is new in Moodle LMS 4.0 and provides a more focussed approach for users accessing courses. The Titus theme has improved upon the existing tile styling of this page, by introducing course progress bars on tiles, improving the general display/aesthetics of course tiles and bringing certain functionality to the forefront; this includes the starring and archiving of courses from a users view.
Furthermore, the Titus theme utilises tiles over the full screen width of the page, meaning more course are presented without less page scrolling required. Enhancements to the responsiveness on mobile devices and different screen sizes have also been made.
🧱 Blocks
Through the Titus theme, many small tweaks have been made to some of the key blocks within Moodle LMS 4.0, including changes to the block collapsible block draw where these blocks can reside. There are universal changes improving all blocks, however enhancements have been made in particular to:
- – Timeline
- – Calendar
- – Upcoming events
- – Latest badges
📑 Course homepage
Using the Titus theme, we recommend utilising the free 3rd party plugin called ‘Softcourse’ format (LINK). Not only is it supported in Moodle LMS 4, but also works very well with the newly introduced course index navigation, allowing users to more efficiently and quickly see what is left for them to complete, and navigate between topics and activities.
Through our theme we have been able to enhance this plugin, by modifying aspects such as the display of images more effectively, progress bars and activity counts showing for topics without having to hover your mouse over each tile etc.
🧭 Navigation
Numerous enhancements were made by Moodle for Moodle 4.0, however our Titus theme builds on these even further! Changes have been made to the display/padding/utilisation of the top navigation bar, from moving the placement of the edit toggle, to introducing a brand new ‘Admin quick links’ drawer to help administrators (or users with certain permissions at a system level such as the ‘Manager’ role) navigate to key admin areas.
Several colour pickers have been introduced specifically for the top navigation bar, such as the colour of the top bar, the highlighted colour if a core link (e.g. ‘Dashboard’) has been selected and the colour of the text on the top nav bar.
The notifications & messaging drawer panels have been reworked to provide a more modern interface, and the course index navigation (within a course) and block drawers have been modified to improve spacing and usage across different devices.
🎛️ Miscellaneous
An array of additional changes have been made through our Titus theme. This includes a large selection of colour pickers to allow organisations to customise/brand their platforms. For instance, there are colour pickers for each of the newly introduced activity type icons, and colour pickers for the different event types available on the platform (e.g. shown through the upcoming events block).
Additional colour pickers are available, including:
- – Link
- – Body text
- – Header text
- – Progress bars
- – Primary buttons
- – Secondary buttons
- – Footer icon
- – Footer icon background
- – Top navigation bar
If your branding is more rounded or ‘jagged’/straight edged, the border radius of key elements can be changed to reflect your brand.
Fonts can be uploaded, or linked to from Google, again helping to ensure your platform matches your brand more closely.
We have also introduced the ability to import and export theme settings. This is particularly useful not just for when Titus are performing upgrades, but also if there are sandbox/test/staging sites alongside a production site, meaning configuration across multiple platforms won’t take any extra time.
🕊️ The release squad
The hardworking smithies of this release:
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
Connor Young – Developer (Release lead)
Kristian Burgess – Graphic Designer
Release icon: Nordic icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
📝 LMS 4 Theme Release Highlights
🚀 ‘Odin’ – V1.1.0 (February 2023)
Titus are again proud to announce the forging of a new release for our Moodle theme plugin. Like the wise one-eyed Odin and his affinity to magic, this crafted release covers a broad range of improvements across the platform .
Again, building on top of the upgraded foundations in Moodle 4.0, Version 1.1.0 ‘Thor’ introduces a new option login page variant, a new calendar drawer, improved calendar/event page aesthetics, a new improved ‘ learning category’ page, the ability to have a ‘dark theme’ by changing key background colours and more.
Titus recommend using the Softcourse or Designer course formats, followed by Tiles format, for use with the Titus theme.
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
This second release focusses on the course category area that needed some love and care put into it. Improving the ‘self service’ mechanism through Moodle will provide a clearer user experience for users.
Alongside this, we have introduced a new calendar drawer, that shows the calendar block and upcoming events, that can be expanded and collapsed no matter where you are in the platform. We have also introduced a new login page variant that admins can choose to use, along with making a host of changes to allow for darker based themes (dark background colours etc).
Again, we value the importance of an aesthetically pleasing learning platform and would love your feedback on this release.
⚡ Highlights
- – New login page variant
- – Increased flexibility on site home for adding blocks
- – Newly styled course library/catalogue
- – Improved course index menu (new ‘Course home’ and expand/collapse buttons) for improved user experience
- – New calendar drawer
- – Improved calendar & upcoming events pages styling
- – Starred courses now appear first on the ‘My Courses’ page
- – New colour settings cater for darker themes to match client branding (i.e. dark background colours)
- – Footer icon presented can now be updated with other fontawesome icons
🎁 What’s inside?
🔑 ‘Login’ page
A new login page variant has been introduced for administrators to select. It provides another modern interface for the first port of call for many users.
The login page is split into 2, with the image being used for the left hand side, and the right hand side being home to the login fields.
🏠 ‘Site home’ page
We have added the ability to add blocks onto the Site home page in the central region. You are able to add blocks into a central 1 column block region and/or use a 3 column block region below.
For any organisations using 3rd party plugins such as IntelliCart (eCommerce) who often like to position the public catalogue on the Site home page, this will now be possible.
📇 Course library
We have improved the ‘course catalogue’ area within Moodle in order to bring more information to the forefront. This includes a tile based display of courses, alongside course titles, descriptions, course contacts, number of topics, tags and more.
To get the most out of this page, we highly suggest ensuring the admin setting ‘Course contacts’ is ticked for all applicable roles who you want to appear as part of the course contact dropdowns beside each course.
Additionally, using the tags functionality adds further value to this area. Tagging courses effectively allows for users to see these tags beside each course. Selecting a tag will take the user to the ‘tags’ area, meaning they can see all associated courses/activities/resources that have the same tag.
(Please note: below screenshot is an early mockup provided – end results may vary slightly).
📚 ‘My courses’ page
When courses are starred, these will now appear at the start of the ‘My courses’ list. Starred courses can still be accessed via the ‘My courses’ filters should you wish to view only these starred courses.
📑 Course homepage
We have enhanced the course navigation index within courses, to include a ‘Course home’ button and an ‘expand/collapse all’ button.
The course home button allows users to more easily return back to the course homepage, preventing them from having to use the breadcrumb trail, which is often overlooked.
The ‘expand/collapse all’ button allows user to quickly expand to view all activities in each topic/section within the course, helping users navigate and find resources more quickly. Similarly the list can be tidied by being collapsed in 1 click.
📅 ‘Calendar’ pages
This release has ‘tidied’ up the month and upcoming events pages (padding/alignment/colours) etc. We have also introduced a new feature called the ‘Calendar drawer’. This icon sits in the top navigation bar that when clicked will reveal a non-editable right hand drawer containing the calendar and upcoming events blocks.
🧭 Navigation
A number of improvements mentioned in other sections affect the navigation around the platform. We have also introduced a setting to remove/hide the ‘Home’ link on the top navigation bar. This can be useful for organisations which wish to have a public site home page but not advertise this to users who are authenticated/logged into the platform.
🎛️ Miscellaneous
This release now caters more widely for an organisations branding. In summary, we have introduced new colour pickers to allow for darker based themes.
The Titus theme (v1.0.0) introduced an array of customisation options around colour pickers for different parts of the platform. Building upon this, we have also introduced the ability to add colour gradients for progress bar colours. Moving forward we hope to allow for gradient colours to be used for other areas of the platform.
The Moodle 4 footer sits at the bottom right of the platform. v1.0.0 introduces the ability to change its size and colour, however now you will have the ability to choose a more suitable font awesome icon, to replace the question mark icon if desired.
🕊️ The release squad
The hardworking smithies of this release:
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
Connor Young – Developer (Release lead)
Kristian Burgess – Graphic Designer
Release icon: Viking icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
📝 LMS 4 Theme Release Highlights
🚀 ‘Loki’ – V1.2.0 (April 2023)
Like Loki, an expert shapeshifter, this release expands its supportability to include support for the Moodle Workplace platform.
Large amounts of architectural work has taken place to cater for Workplace multi-tenancy support, provide a huge array of tenant customisation branding options.
The Moodle Workplace 4.0+ ‘My teams’ block and ‘My Courses’ pages have undergone extensive improvements to provide more aesthetically pleasing Workplace platforms to these fundamental areas.
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
The Loki release focusses largely on adding the compatibility & support with the Moodle Workplace product. There is a huge array of personalisation we have introduced to each tenant; allowing organisations to truly customise each tenant.
Two other key areas of Moodle Workplace are the My courses page and the Team overview page. Both have been improved visually through this release to make using these areas easier.
There are still improvements added that affect both Moodle LMS and Workplace, including the re-introduction of the ‘combo list’ on the root category page, and the ability to choose the location of the language selector for users.
As always, we greatly encourage you to provide feedback and submit requests/votes via our portal page, for what you’d like to see next.
⚡ Highlights
- – Workplace – Support for the Moodle Workplace product. Architectural work has gone into supporting multi-tenancy and providing extensive, world exclusive tenant branding/customisation options!
- – Workplace – Re-styling improvements for the ‘My courses’ page
- – Workplace – Updated styling of the ‘My Teams’ block
- – New ‘Top alert’ header setting that sits above the top nav bar for alerting users or branding purposes.
- – Language selector – a new option to allow for users to change their language from the top nav bar.
- – Course catalogue – re-introduced the ‘combo list’ functionality into the course library root page.
🎁 What’s inside?
🏢 Moodle Workplace Compatibility
The golden apple of this release… Loki introduces support for both Moodle LMS and Workplace platforms.
One of the key areas we have worked on is the multi tenancy branding and personalisation. It is possible to configure separate site home slideshows/shortcuts and marketing tiles for a unique experience for each tenant.
Furthermore, every setting currently existing within the theme settings, will be possible to configure on a tenant level, including colours, fonts, images and much more!
We are extremely excited to share this customisation with all of our clients as we take multi tenancy to the next level.
📚 WORKPLACE – ‘My courses’ pages
We have revamped the Moodle Workplace My courses page to separate programs and courses and to utilise a larger tile based display.
Smaller introductions include the ‘overdue’ learning flag if programs or courses are past their due date, and also the new circular progress bars that visibly increase upon page load.
There is now a new colour setting to allow you to choose the colour of these circle progress indicators.
📇 Course library
We have re-introduced the ‘combo list’ back onto the root library page (e.g. URL/course). Within Moodle 4, this page was blank, but we have reintroduced this functionality and ensured it is styled in the same manner as when viewing categories.
This allows users to expand and collapse categories in one area, instead of navigating inside each category.
Another small enhancement area is that we have introduced ‘show more’ on the left hand ‘top categories’ block, to prevent a potential large scroll on this page. If more than 10 top level categories exist, a ‘show more’ link is available that when clicked will display all top level categories. Similarly, these can be collapsed using the ‘show less’ link.
🧑🤝🧑 WORKPLACE – Team overview block
We have improved the display of a Workplace only block that displays your team members / who you manage through the organisation structure that has been setup on the platform.
You can clearly identify when users have one or more jobs assigned, along with their progress made in each area and can clearly identify when a piece of learning is overdue.
🎛️ Miscellaneous & navigation
A new setting allows administrators to introduce the language selector in the top navigation bar (default is under the user menu dropdown).
It is also now possible to utilise colour gradients for the top nav bar background colour to match branding and make your site stand out.
In the previous version we introduced the calendar drawer. We have now introduced a setting to enable or disable the calendar drawer as per your preference.
EXPERIMENTAL! We have introduced the first stages of a sitewide visible header that sits about the top navigation bar. For now, it has been introduced into a new ‘Experimental settings’ area. You are able to define the height, background colour, upload an image and choose the location (left/centre/right) of the image.
Moving forward we hope to build on this functionality and move it out of the experimental area. This can be used for branding purposes or communicate key messages or even highlight the use of a site.
🕊️ The release squad
The hardworking smithies of this release:
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
Connor Young – Developer
Vitaly Potenko – Developer
Steve – Lead Developer (Release lead)
Kristian Burgess – Graphic Designer
Release icon: Folklore icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
📝 LMS 4 Theme Release Highlights
🚀 ‘Heimdall’ – V1.3.0 (August 2023)
Mimicking Heimdall the watcher’s keen eyesight and hearing; Titus has watched, listened and absorbed customer insights to create this new release.
There are huge features packed into this release, adding value across the board. There are accessibility and mobile view improvements, a new sitewide footer sitting at the bottom of every page to further brand up the platform, the introduction of course banner images and so much more!
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
The Heimdall release builds upon an already solid foundation by adding new functionality into multiple areas of the platform.
Aside from introducing a new sitewide footer and course banner images, we’ve also added big items such as the ability to change dashboard layouts to better suit your content. We’ve even brought some basic statistics onto the My courses page, so users can quickly see how many courses they’re enrolled in, how many are completed and even how many badges and certificates have been awarded (all toggle-able of course).
We’ve ensured the priority of mobile access and general accessibility has been high, to deliver an improved experience on more devices and to even more users.
As always, we greatly encourage you to provide feedback and submit requests/votes via our portal page, for what you’d like to see next.
⚡ Highlights
- Updated settings – Revamped settings area makes it easier to find the relevant settings.
- Sitewide footer – New sitewide footer available introducing logo upload, custom link entry and footnote area.
- ‘My courses’ statistics – Introduction of statistics on the My courses page (course enrolled/courses completed etc).
- Login page – Option to change order of login page items, meaning the login via identity providers (e.g. Office 365/Google) appear above collapsed manual login boxes.
- Dashboard layouts – The ability for admins to choose the block region layout on dashboards.
- Course banner images – Course banner images can now be enabled to display at the top of course homepages. Admins can also upload a default banner image to be used if a course doesn’t have a course file uploaded.
- Accessibility – A huge array of accessibility fixes have been made to ensure we are working alongside becoming WCAG 2.1AA compliant.
- Mobile access – Huge improvements to our theme responsiveness focussing on mobile devices. A new navigation bar is introduced for mobiles to improve navigation across the board.
- Courses – activity navigation – Within courses, we have introduced the ability to enable next/previous buttons for additional navigation between activities.
- ‘Back to top’ button – Furthermore we have introduced a ‘back to top’ button, so on longer pages/courses it allows users to get back to the top of the page more quickly and efficiently.
- Site home (slideshow) – Multiple slideshow improvements on the site home page to provide additional customisation and improve the display of text over images.
🎁 What’s inside?
Login page
Based on this popular request, we have introduced a new setting to choose the display order of login options oh the login page. This allows you to choose the login identity provider option as the priority for the login page, moving the manual login options under a collapsible area. This will help streamline the login process for some organisations whose priority is single sign on with a third party system, where presenting manual login options can cause confusion.
Site home
We’ve made a number of changes to the slideshow and shortcuts on the site home page to improve accessibility colour contrast and customisation. These changes include:
- New slideshow settings:
- Slideshow title font size
- Slideshow font colour
- Image brightness filter
When slideshows are disabled, shortcuts are now shown correctly. Previously a slideshow had to be used in order for shortcuts to be displayed correctly.
- New shortcut settings:
- Shortcut background colour
- Shortcut font colour
Course library
After re-introducing the ‘combo list’ to the main library page, we have made some further styling adjustments to improve the experience of expanding and collapsing categories, without accidentally clicking on category links.
Dashboard
To aid in the further personalisation of a users experience on the platform, we have introduced the ability for admins to choose a custom dashboard layout.
On Moodle, different blocks are better suited to different sized regions, so now you’ll be able to better prepare your pages depending on the blocks you wish to present to your users on the dashboard.
My courses
A new enhancement allowing you to display some simple statistics to your users. These can be enabled/disabled on a per statistic panel basis but are our first step in adding further value to this area of Moodle.
We’ve also revamped the course tiles on Moodle LMS. Our course tiles now meet the same standard across Moodle LMS and Workplace. These course tiles will still be affected by chosen settings such as card border radius.
Left screenshot is a Moodle LMS course tile, right screenshot is a Moodle Workplace program tile.
Another new addition is a setting to allow you to remove tile overlay options (archive and star course) from the course image and move them under an ellipses menu on course tiles.
Course pages
A well requested feature now introduced are course banner images that should bring a bit more life to your courses. Admins can enable these, choose the height of the banners and also provide a brightness overlay to ensure lighter images will still work with the white course name font.
Furthermore, administrators can upload a default banner image, meaning that if a course editor doesn’t yet upload a course file, the default banner image will be used. If neither a course editor or admin has uploaded an image, then don’t worry we have you covered. Our theme holds a default abstract image so it won’t appear blank.
A further course improvement consists of newly introduced topic/section links inside activity breadcrumb trail. Previously you could access the course home only by using the breadcrumb trail, but now you can select the topic/section name to be taken directly back to this area. Useful on larger courses in particular but be that not all course formats have specific links to sections so in this instance you’d be returned to the course home.
To further improve the course navigation experience we have introduced a setting to allow you to enable a next and previous button inside activities. These sit at the bottom left of activities as links to the corresponding activities.
2 further smaller improvements consist of being able to now choose the highlight colour for highlighted sections within courses and also a new course activity display setting. The latter setting allows you to control the padding around a listed activity in a course. So if you wish for activities to be listed in a more clustered fashion or to space out activities on the course home, you’ll have the ability to do this.
🎛️ Miscellaneous & navigation
We decided that we needed to ensure our vast array of settings were organised in a more logical and efficient way… so that’s what we did! In this version all the settings have been moved under more appropriate headings, helping us futureproof for new settings in the future.
Potentially the most requested feature of this release is the introduction of a sitewide footer that really allows you to personalise the platform further. There are a number of settings for this feature that allow you to upload a footer image, define headings and links organised in 4 columns; and also add a custom footnote for you to add additional text and information.
Another enhancement that is sitewide is a new setting allowing you to enable a ‘back to top’ button. In long courses or activities with alot of vertical content, users can now quickly and easily return to the top of the page at the click of a button.
Smaller improvements include:
- A new setting to control the ‘sitewide body font size’.
- A dropdown allowing you to select 3 slight block variant displays.
- We’ve added a few more key system level settings into the admin quick links drawer:
- Site home settings
- System content bank
- System question bank
- New colour picker for the block background drawer which also affects the course index menu.
Accessibility
Our ongoing goal is to align with Moodle and ensure WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. We have put a huge amount of work into making the platform more accessible to users that may have a range of accessibility issues.
Thanks in particular to the University College London (UCL) who’ve helped guide us on this journey.
Mobile
This release also brings Moodle by Titus more effectively onto mobile devices. We’ve introduced a new mobile/tablet view (depending on your screen size) by displaying a new mobile navigation bar.
This has allowed us to distribute some of the options & controls in a more effective manner, for both Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace.
Left screenshot below is Moodle LMS and right is Moodle Workplace logged in as an administrator.
🕊️ The release squad
The hardworking smithies of this release:
Edd Clementson – Product Lead
Connor Young – Developer (Release lead)
Vitaly Potenko – Developer
Steve – Lead Developer
Dan – DevOps Engineer
Kristian Burgess – Graphic Designer
Release icon: Horn icons created by Freepik – Flaticon
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