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

Time for action—creating a block graphic by using Photoshop


  1. 1. Create a new layer and select the Rectangular Marquee tool. Create a rectangle selection with a width of 225 and a height of 380. There is no need to be exact.

  2. 2. Go to the colors palette and choose the following color for the foreground color, and then click on OK.

  3. 3. Go to the menu bar and choose Edit | Stroke | OK with the stroke set at 1px. Then go to the menu bar and choose Select | Deselect. You have just made the outline for your block.

  4. 4. Create a new layer and click on the Rectangular Marquee tool and create a rectangle of 218 x 60 pixels.

  5. 5. Go to the file menu and choose Select | Modify | Smooth, and then the Sample Radius to 5px.

  6. 6. You should have something similar to the following screenshot:

  7. 7. Now click on the gradient tool on the tools palette, but first make sure that your color chooser has the same colors as the following screenshot. The gray color is: #dddddd.

  8. 8. Now with the gradient toolbar showing, click...