15 April 2015, 7:41

We've been interested in turning on skins to use with our Mahara site since we're about to open it up for most students to use. From what I understand, this can be done by adding a line to the config.php file, however, because we use Moodlerooms as our host we're apparently unable to edit it. This is what Moodlerooms sent me when I asked if it was possible:

I recommend reaching out to the Mahara community for suggestions in implementing a workaround. If a workaround requires SFTP access, please let me know and I will forward your credentials if needed."

So, does anyone having any suggestions for a workaround? Is there a workaround, or is the only way to use skins to edit the config.php file?

15 April 2015, 9:29

Sorry James,

But there is not workaround for activating skins. You must change the config.php to do activate skins.

Moodleroom should understand that they could activate it and let the admin of each institution decide whether skins are or are not then used in their institution.

Sorry about that.

-dajan

15 April 2015, 13:54

We originally added made skins enabled by a config.php flag because it wasn't "ready for primetime" yet. But now that it has been in use for a couple of releases and had the kinks worked out, we're planning to add a front-end setting to enable it in the 15.10 release of Mahara (due out in October 2015).

In the meantime, if you have access to your database, you can activate the feature that way. Just run this query:

insert into config (field, value) values ('skins', 1);

Cheers,

Aaron

19 April 2015, 13:26

Hi Aaron,

Since we already have the setting for allowing or disallowing skins also for "No institution" and not only "regular institutions" in the admin area, shouldn't it then be enough to simply always have the config value set to "true" so that it will be on by default and then the individual institutions can still decide? I would keep it turned off by default in the institution settings, but set the config.php value to "true". Only if a multi-tenanted site does not want to allow skins at all would they set it to false to not allow any institutions to work with skins.

Cheers

Kristina

19 April 2015, 13:21

Hello James,

Since I don't know how much MoodleRooms monitors the forums, I forwarded your query to someone I know there so she can discuss that with the support team. As dajan writes, you'll still need to turn skins on in the administration once they are allowed in general in the config. So hopefully, MoodleRooms will be able to make that change.

Cheers

Kristina