Union

Supercharge Moodle’s appearance — without rewriting it

Boost Union is a free, open-source child theme of Moodle’s default Boost theme. It adds the configuration knobs that Boost itself doesn’t expose, so administrators can shape branding, navigation, login, footer and content presentation without writing CSS, forking a theme, or paying for a commercial alternative.

It’s not a redesign of Moodle. It doesn’t change how courses work, how learners progress, or how teachers grade. What it does is straightforward and useful: it lets you make a Moodle site look like your platform instead of looking like every other Moodle site — and it does that through a long list of well-documented settings that respect Moodle’s upgrade path.

We say “supercharge” because the difference between vanilla Boost and a properly configured Boost Union site is real and visible. We don’t say “transform” because under the hood it’s still Moodle, and that’s exactly what you want.

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The philosophy: nothing changes until you ask it to

Install Boost Union, set it as the site theme, and… nothing visibly happens. Every feature is off by default. That sounds boring, but it’s the single most important property of the theme:

• No surprises after an upgrade.
• No fighting with defaults that don’t match your brand.
• No “vendor look” creeping into your platform.

You opt in, feature by feature, only to what your site needs. Everything else stays out of the way.

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What Union actually gives you

The theme groups its capabilities into a settings tree with dozens of sections. The features that matter most to most sites are these:

Branding

Full and compact logos with independent navbar sizing, favicon (with overrides), brand color, link color, button color, full access to the Bootstrap color palette, custom font upload, and a navbar that can render light, dark, primary-tinted, or fully custom.

Login page

Multiple background images with random rotation and copyright attribution, configurable form position and transparency, vertical / tabbed / accordion layouts for sites that mix local login, IdPs, self-registration and guest access, and a side-entrance login page for SSO recovery scenarios.

Smart menus

A flexible menu builder that places custom navigation in the main navbar, the mobile bottom menu, or the user menu. Items can be static links, course or category lists, or user-profile links, with role and capability filters per item. It removes a common reason for buying a commercial theme.

Course headers

Richer headers than Boost’s title-only default — course image, breadcrumbs, completion info, metadata — with overrides for teachers and managers.

Activities, icons and calendar

Custom activity icons (SVG with PNG fallbacks), activity-purpose color coding (administration, assessment, collaboration, communication, content, interactive content) and matching calendar event coloring.

Content pages and footer

Built-in slots for About, Imprint, Contact, Help, Maintenance, Accessibility Declaration, plus generic pages for anything else. Footer notes, suppression of plugin-injected footer noise, breadcrumb and category controls.

Information banners, advertisement tiles and homepage slider

Targeted messaging banners, promotional tiles for the site home, and a slider for hero content — useful when the site home doubles as a landing page.

Six additional block regions

Outside the layout (top/bottom/left/right), in the header, above and below content, a three-column footer, and an off-canvas drawer. Each region can be enabled per layout. This alone removes a lot of “we need a custom layout” requests.

Dashboard and course display

Toggle course images in card/summary/list views, completion progress bars in overviews, geometric-pattern fallbacks when no course image exists, alternative category and course list layouts.

Advanced styling

Raw initial and post SCSS, external SCSS loaded from a URL or a private GitHub repository, a library of built-in and uploadable SCSS snippets, custom font hosting, and CLI tooling to validate SCSS compilation before deployment.

Flavours

Different look-and-feel per course category or cohort — different colors, fonts, images, even SCSS — without running multiple theme instances. This is the feature most often missing from competing themes and is genuinely useful for multi-department Moodle sites.

Mobile, navigation and accessibility

Mobile app CSS, iOS homescreen icon, drawer width tuning, back-to-top button, activity navigation, starred-courses popover, mailto/external link marking, accessibility declaration page and support form, JavaScript disabled warning.

That’s the short version. The full list is longer and is documented in the theme’s README and admin overview page.

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Union for Workplace

Moodle Workplace (TM) operators have a different problem: one Moodle site, many tenants, and each tenant typically wants its own logo, colors, login background and tone of voice. Workplace ships with a tenant branding form, but it stops at logos and a few colors.

The Union Workplace connector (local_boost_union_mwp) closes that gap. It re-wires Union’s branding pipeline so the same theme works tenant-aware on Workplace:

• Per-tenant compiled CSS. Each tenant gets its own cached stylesheet, keyed by both Union flavour and Workplace tenant.
• Boost Union settings inside the Workplace tenant branding form. Header logo, compact and login logos, login background images, favicon, brand color, link color, button color, navbar tint, navbar color mode, branded grays, raw SCSS, and footnote — all editable per tenant from the screen Workplace admins already know.
• Tenant-aware navbar and login. The Workplace tenant switcher and launcher render correctly inside Union’s navbar (and stay legible on dark navbars). The login layout respects Workplace seat quotas, automatically hiding self-registration when a tenant is full.
• Catalog awareness. The connector warns when Union’s course/category list settings are overridden by Workplace’s tool_catalogue, with a direct link to the right place.
• Shared-space fallback. Users outside any specific tenant get the default tenant’s branding, so the site never falls back to a generic look.

Combined with Boost Union’s Flavours, you can layer Workplace-tenant branding on top of category-specific branding without managing several themes — one theme, one upgrade path, branding that scales with the tenancy model.

The connector is GPLv3 and is maintained alongside the theme, but distribution runs through Moodle’s Premium Partner network: it isn’t a download you can pick up from the plugin directory. The path is straightforward — we’ll happily demo it for you, and if you’d like to try it on a real environment we can give you a tenant on our own Workplace site to evaluate it end-to-end. Once you’re ready to deploy it on your platform, your Moodle Premium Partner handles the purchase and rollout. If you don’t yet have a partner, we can point you in the right direction.

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Adding Dash to the mix

Boost Union shapes the chrome — the navbar, the footer, the login, the global styling. Dash and its addons shape what sits inside the page: dashboards, landing pages, course-category fronts, login areas. The two are designed to work together, and together they cover most of what site owners ask custom theme developers to build.

Below is what each of the eight addons we recommend pairing with Boost Union is actually useful for. These are blocks; they go where Moodle lets you place blocks (including the six extra Boost Union regions).

Hero

A full-width hero with image, heading, subtext and call-to-action. Use it on the site home, the dashboard, or category pages. The “Welcome to your learning platform” header in our demo site is a Hero. Practical use: replace the empty top of the site home with something that tells visitors where they are and what to do.

Tiles

Card-style entry points with icon, title, description and link. Three or four tiles below the hero are usually enough to point learners at “My courses”, “Catalog”, “Profile” or any other primary destination. On a multi-product landing page they double as a topic / product menu.

Slider

A rotating set of slides, each with an image and optional content. Best for promoting time-limited content — campaigns, new courses, upcoming events — without rebuilding the page each time.

Accordion

Collapsible sections with rich content inside. Good for FAQ areas on the login page, onboarding info on the dashboard, or compact policy / help blocks on category pages — anywhere you’d otherwise paste a long block of text.

User interests

A tag selector that lets users mark topics they care about. Once tags are set, other Dash widgets (course lists, recommended content) can filter by them. This is the simplest path to a “recommended for you” experience without buying a recommendation engine.

Footer

Block-driven footer content that lives inside the layout, not buried in theme settings. Pairs well with Boost Union’s footnote: use Boost Union for legal links and copyright, use the Dash Footer block for richer content (columns, contact, social, helpful links).

Greeting

A time-aware greeting that addresses the user by name. Small touch, disproportionately positive effect on how personal a Moodle site feels — visible in our screenshots as the “Good night, Stefan-Alexander…” banner.

Content

A rich content block with the full Moodle editor, including layout-friendly templates. The workhorse of any Dash-driven page — use it for everything the named addons don’t cover.

Built on top of Boost Union’s six extra block regions and Flavours, these eight blocks are enough to assemble a custom-looking home, dashboard and login without a single line of theme code. Our demo site at https://bdecent-wp51.eledia.de/ is built exactly this way.

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What to expect, honestly

Boost Union is a theme. It will not make a poorly structured course catalog discoverable, fix bad course content, or replace the work of a proper information architect. It will:

• Remove the “this looks like default Moodle” objection.
• Give your admin team a way to brand the site themselves and keep it branded after upgrades.
• Provide the extension points (block regions, flavours, smart menus, snippets) that custom theme work normally has to add from scratch.
• On Workplace, give each tenant a fully branded experience without forking the theme per tenant.
• With Dash addons, let non-developers assemble dashboards and landing pages that look intentional.

That’s enough to noticeably change how a Moodle site is perceived — by learners, by stakeholders, and by the people who have to demo it. It’s not enough to fix a platform that has deeper problems, and we’d rather say so up front than oversell.

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Getting started

• Union is free on the Moodle plugin directory and on GitHub. Install, set it as the site theme, and start switching on the features you need.
• The Workplace connector (local_boost_union_mwp) is distributed exclusively through Moodle Premium Partners. The usual path is: see a demo with us, optionally try it on a test tenant we provision on our Workplace site, then purchase it through your Premium Partner for installation on your own platform.
• Dash and its addons are available from bdecent — see the Dash product page for the full addon catalog and licensing.

If you’d like help configuring Boost Union for your site, designing a Flavour set for a multi-department platform, building a custom dashboard with Dash, or evaluating the Workplace connector, that’s what we do — talk to us at bdecent.de.