30 November 2014, 17:50

Hello Emilie,

We have not thought of adding the icons to the default Mahara theme. In contrast to the Moodle theme, in Mahara you cannot change them easily. And per default, all your blocks (except for the ones on the dashboard) have the same icon which is not so great. That is a limitation of Mahara because we do not have different classes on blocks.

Cheers

Kristina

11 December 2014, 6:00

Hello Kristina,

Since this theme was built for Mahara 1.8 and it's no longer maintained, are you aware of any compatibility issues with Mahara 1.10.1?

Cheers

Al

11 December 2014, 21:50

Hello Alain

We have the theme Essential installed on Mahara 1.9.  We plan to upgrade very soon on Mahara 1.10, i am also interested to know if there are any compatibility issues with 1.10...  We'll test it before on our test platform and will let you know.

By the way, we have to think about a new theme since Essential is no longer maintained.

Cheers

Emilie

12 December 2014, 0:44

Hello,

I have the theme Essential installed on my Mahara/Moodle and it's working on 1.10 and on 15.04 dev.

But I have deactivated it  because it isn't maintained anymore. I would not recommend to use it in the future, for this reason.

Maybe someone in the community can take over Julian Ridden and maintain it?

-dajan

12 December 2014, 1:59

Hmm..is there a reason why the very popular but sadly orphaned Essential theme should not be added to the core themes of Mahara?

Are there any issues with this?

14 December 2014, 16:39

Hello all,

The majority of the functionality will probably still work on Mahara 1.10, but we did make a number of changes since 1.8 so that they will need to be updated.

As mentioned before, the theme is basically the default theme (the white and green one) with the addition of the icons for certain blocks (some people don't like the magnifying glass one for all blocks so have taken those out and only use the icons on the dashboard and the sidebar) and a different color scheme. I am assuming that the icons are the most important thing from the Essential theme as institutions might want to use their own colors and logo instead. Apparently, there is not much custom CSS to get the icons to work. We at the core team have not yet had the time to identify these and put them up somewhere online for people to simply add to their existing theme. If someone has some spare time and has been working with the theme to identify them, please feel free to share them. Theoretically, it should then be possible to add those icons to other themes as well.

Since the theme is so close to the default theme, we are not planning on implementing it into core. If it were to go into core, I would recommend some adjustments, e.g. removing icons from the standard blocks as they always show the same icon (except for blocks on the dashboard) or change Mahara so that different blocks can be identified as such.

Cheers

Kristina

20 October 2015, 22:05

Hi, We have just started to use latest version of Essential on our Moodle installation. So my question is: Does Essential for Mahara work with latest Mahara version 15.04?

BR/Jonas

02 December 2015, 13:37

I have found that it does not work any more. I do not think it will be very hard for me to port over the styles from the old theme to the new bootstrap themes. I have been feeling like the essential theme is showing it's age and is not really supported any more anyway.

23 December 2015, 12:55

Hello Patric,

Instead of trying to port the Essential functionality over (was only small addition to the default theme), you may wish to take a look at the 15.10 Primary School theme. That includes icons in the main navigation and might give you a better indiciation / starting point of working with FontAwesome icons in Bootstrap. Furthermore, we don't connect to the FontAwesome CDN, but serve the icons locally which increases the speed of the page load.

Cheers

Kristina

19 January 2016, 15:00

Hello folks,

just a heads up that a 'Essential 2' theme will be released shortly. My free site www.portfoliocommunities.com is turning 5 this week and so I thought this would make a nice present. It wont be an upgrade from the exciting Essential theme but rather something new.