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

What is a Moodle theme?


A Moodle theme is a template that controls the way Moodle looks. A theme can be changed by the Moodle administrator and can have its settings altered through the Moodle administrative interface. A theme does not normally affect the way Moodle functions, only the way it looks. You may have come across the term "theme" before in web applications such as Content Management Systems (CMS) and blogs such as WordPress, all of which have the ability to have their look or design changed through theming. WordPress, for example, has hundreds of themes available and many more that can be downloaded from various sites on the Internet. Examples of places from which you can search and download Moodle's themes on the Internet will be covered later in this chapter.

Theming as a concept for any web application is sometimes referred to as skinning. In general, these terms are used interchangeably and both refer to the separation of design (look and feel) from the functionality of the...