Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Moodle 1.9 Theme Design: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Moodle is a highly extensible virtual learning environment and is used to deliver online teaching and training materials. Theming is one of the main features of Moodle that can be used to customize your online courses and make them look exactly how you want them to. If you have been looking for a book that will help you develop Moodle Themes that you are proud of, and that your students would enjoy, then this is the book for you.This book will show you how to create themes for Moodle, change pre-installed Moodle themes, and download new themes from various resources on the Internet. It is filled with suggestions and examples for adapting classroom activities to the Virtual Learning Environment.This book starts off by introducing Moodle, explaining what it is, how it works, and what tools you might need to create a stunning Moodle theme. It then moves on to show you in detailed steps how to choose and change a Moodle theme, and explains what Moodle themes are and how they work. It shows you how to change an existing theme and test the changes that you have made.The latter half of this book will start you off on the road to creating your own themes from scratch. It provides detailed instructions to guide you through the stages of creating a stunning theme for your Moodle site. From planning theme creation, through to the slicing and dicing, and more advanced Moodle theming processes, this book will give you step-by-step instructions to create your own Moodle theme.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Moodle 1.9 Theme Design
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Glossary of Useful Terms and Acronyms

Theming the central area of our Moodle site


It is true to say that one of the issues with theming Moodle is that you cannot edit the central content section of your site, as it does not have an associated HTML file. The only areas that you can really edit are the header and footer. However, you can nevertheless use CSS to make some changes to the way the central section looks. You can change fonts, font colors and sizes, and add borders and backgrounds to the central page elements. You can therefore get away with making these areas at least look reasonable in terms of matching your existing theme's look and feel. You cannot, however, move any of the central content elements, such as the login info link or the placement of your logo, as you can in the header and footer. You also cannot add anything to this section in terms of HTML or PHP elements or functionality without changing the core code. And you do not really want to change the core code because when you come to update your Moodle...