Front Page

The front page is the initial page seen by someone reaching a Moodle site after or before a login. Typically a student will see courses, some blocks of information, displayed in a theme. In the Navigation bar and Navigation block it is called “Home”.

A combination of site policies, user authentication and front page settings determine who can get to the front page. And once they get there what they can see and what they can do.

Front page settings

The site’s Front page is similar to a course page. The front page settings, roles, filters, backup, restore and questions are currently duplicated in Administration > Front page > Front page settings. The following settings may be changed:

  • Full site name - This name appears at the top of every page above the navigation bar.

    _images/site_fullname.png

  • Short name for site - The short name appears at the beginning of the navigation bar as a link back to your site front page.

  • Front page summary - This summary can be displayed on the front page using the course/site summary block.

  • Front page and Front page items when logged in - The centre of the front page can display any combination of the following: news items, a list of courses, a list of enrolled courses, a list of course categories, a list of categories and courses, a course search box or none. The order is determined by a combination box. It is possible to create one setting for anyone who gets to the front page without logging in to the Moodle site, and another look for only those who have logged into the Moodle site. There are two combination boxes.

  • Maximum category depth - This specifies the maximum depth of child categories expanded when displaying categories or combo list. Deeper level categories will appear as links and user can expand them with AJAX request.

  • Maximum number of courses - Maximum number of courses to be displayed on the site’s front page in course listings.

  • Include a topic section - This adds a topic section to the centre-top of the front page. When editing is turned on, resources and/or activities can be added to the topic section using the dropdown menus, in the same way as on a course page.

Note: The label resource can be used to add text and/or an image to the centre-top of the front page.
  • News items to show - This setting only applies if the front page is set to display news items or if you are using the Latest News block.
  • Comments per page - Each course may include a Comments block which allows the display of user comments. The number of comments displayed at any time is set here.
  • Default front page role - The default frontpage role enables logged-in users to participate in front page activities. It is recommended that it is set to frontpage role. It should never be set to Guest.