As Site Administrator, you can control the behaviour of the Tiles plugin under Site Administration > Plugins > Course Formats > Tiles

Here are the tabs the Site Administrator can see by visiting Site Administration > Plugins > Course Formats > Tiles

Admin settings example

On this tab the Site Administrator can set the available tile colours site wide, to ensure that the tile colours match the theme, without needing custom CSS. You can pick up to 6 colours, which will then be available for teachers to apply to courses under Course Administration > Edit Settings > Format like this

Colour picker example

The Site Administrator also has a button on this tab to “Reset all course colours”. This is useful after the available colours have been changed, so that you can ensure that all existing courses conform to the new colours.

The tile hover colour can also be changed here.

The site administrator can allow or disallow certain activities and resources to open in modal windows (e.g. PDF, Page, URL). The default is to allow.

If you disallow this setting for “Page” for example, pages will be handled in the standard Moodle way when clicked.

(A modal window is an animated pop up window which sits on top of the main window, allowing the user to use it or dismiss it and return to the original page, without having to wait for the original page to reload.)

The administrator can enable or disable photo tiles, and customise their appearance here.

For example should the title have a semi-transparent background or not? Should the title be at the top or bottom of the tile?

There used to be controls for storing content in the browser, but these were removed for Moodle 3.11 as they could cause issues with stale content being presented when availability had changed where activity completion was being used.

The site administrator can enable or disable the animations used by the plugin here. By default, they are all enabled.

(Individual users also have the ability to disable JavaScript navigation for their own accounts only, using the “Animated navigation off” control on the course menu).

The site administrator can add custom CSS here if necessary, which will be rendered on Tiles course pages. There are some other settings which have explanations attached.

The Custom CSS box can be useful for example if you want to change the colours used for subtiles. E.g. you could add something like

li.activity.subtile.resource.pdf li.activity.subtile.resource.pdf { border-top-color: purple !important; }