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

Creating a design using graphics software


If you look closely at the following design, you will notice that all of the details of the header are clearly marked out from the previous wireframe example. All I have done here is taken the wireframe and filled it with the most common elements that belong to all Moodle themes. I have then filled in the block areas with the colors that I want to use, and finally I made the left and right sideblocks a little prettier. For now, the most important area is the header, as this is what you will be concentrating on first.

Note

This .psd file can be downloaded from the Packt website if needed.

It's basic but functional and doesn't require too much Photoshop manipulation. In actual fact, the only parts that really need Photoshop are the logo and block headers, but for the sake of having something to compare against while you create your own theme, it would be best if you build this design in Photoshop beforehand. If you do not have Photoshop, then any other...