Dark mode
In Moodle 5.3 a new experimental setting in the Boost theme, called ‘enablecolourmodes’ with a description of “Allow people to switch the site between a light and a dark colour scheme. When disabled, the site is always shown in light mode. This feature is experimental. Plugins are only shown in the dark colour scheme if they take their colours from the theme, so pages of a plugin which has not been checked yet may be shown with light backgrounds, or with text which is hard to read against them.” has been introduced, but what exactly is it?
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Dark mode
Enabling the setting ‘enablecolourmodes’ essentially turns on a ‘Dark mode’:
It is a representation of the content with an inverted ‘dark’ look to that for which we’ve come to terms as the normal for web pages. That is a similarity to the physical paper form of the printed matter of the past.
To compare:
We see on the right, the dark version of the left. We no longer need the light physical version to read in low light because of reflection of the paper. We have the screen. Indeed in dark light environments then it can be preferable to look at a dark rather than light screen. And it can possibly reduce eye strain, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_mode.
I think it is actually down to personal choice. That with this option you can choose what suits you, even changing at different times of the day. With ‘enablecolourmodes’ enabled, you get a new icon on the ‘Navbar’:
It’s initial value depends on what the administrator has set in the setting ‘defaultcolourmode’. Both you and they have three choices: ‘Light’, ‘Dark’ and ‘System’. When set to ‘System’ the software detects what ‘mode’ you have set in your device / browser (if it supports it) and then sets accordingly.
Experimental
At this point the functionality is marked as ‘Experimental’. At the time of typing, I’m running ‘5.3rc2 (Build: 20261002)’ of Moodle and did notice icon issues for the modules when restoring a course:
There is also ‘Plugin’ support required too. For example, I have been adding dark mode to the Adaptable theme in my development version. Where I’ve also been experimenting with different drawer toggles too:
Which ‘just works’ with the light colour values you’ve set in its settings. Though the ‘style’ of the theme being the header does not change, only the drop down menus from it:
Conclusion
What do you think please? Is this a setting you’ll enable? In test? In production?
Do you think that it is a worthy addition?
- Dark mode - 16th October 2026
- Endianness - 16th September 2026
- Crossover - 16th August 2026
