Moodle Mobile 2 (Ionic 1) Customization
Overview
Moodle Mobile can be customized in different ways:
- Changing the app appearance for your site.
- Creating a set of remote plugins in order to add additional functionalities to the app.
- Creating a custom application (with your custom name and icon) based on the Moodle Mobile code.
The first two options does not require to compile or build your custom application, the third one requires to compile and publish your custom app in the stores.
Changing the app appearance for your site
The Mobile app can retrieve your custom styles from your Moodle site. Since is an HTML5 app, you can apply safely CSS3 styles.
In your Moodle installation go to Plugins / Web services / Mobile and enter in the mobilecssurl field a valid URL pointing to a CSS file containing your custom styles (theme).
The CSS should be placed inside your Moodle installation (in your custom theme or inside a local plugin)
Once the user is logged in the app, there is a periodical process that retrieves your remote CSS files for applying your custom styles into the app.
Notice that on the first time a user opens the app, he will see the default "orange" style. Your custom styles will be applied once the user has added a site in the app.
Notice also that styles comes from a site, there is no way for changing the initial Add site / Manage account pages styles.
See Moodle Mobile Themes for additional information.
Remote plugins
Remote plugins will be available in Moodle 3.0, Moodle Mobile 2 (MM2) is going to be able to pull app plugins (AngularJS modules) from the remote site and lazy load them into the app. This will happen every time a user login into a site (or the remote site information is refreshed).
Creating a custom application
You will need a custom app if you want:
- Custom corporate image (name, app icon, theme, store entry)
- Add additional features or static pages
- Remove or change existing features
- Custom translation of the app
- Use your own notifications infrastructure
Creating a custom application should be easy, you need to follow the basic setup instructions in Moodle Mobile Plugins Development and once you have a local installation running you just need to: Edit all the *.json and *.xml settings file in order to change the application name and application id to your custom one. Change all the icons and splash screens in the /resources directory Add your custom styles in scss/app.scss
Detailed steps will be published soon, since Moodle Mobile 2.0 is quite new and the API it's not still stable we recommend to not create custom applications until an official guide is published.
Building
There are two options for building the app, aka compile it to different devices:
Phonegap Build
Phonegap Build is an online service that let you to build the app automatically for different platforms. The main advantage is that simplify a lot the process of building.
You just put your www/ folder in a github account and Phonegaps automatically build the app for different platforms pulling your github code.
Notice that the free version is for open repositories, but you can use the non-free version for private repositories.
“Ionic CLI
You can build also using the Ionic CLI tools, see: http://ionicframework.com/docs/cli/run.html
