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 the block header background


  1. 1. Start Adobe Photoshop, and open your design mockup.

  2. 2. Hide all of the layers except the block header, by clicking on the eye in the layer's palette for all the layers that you have.

  3. 3. Zoom in on the block header by pressing the Ctrl and + keys together. Zoom in to about 600%.

  4. 4. Click on the Rectangular Marquee tool and carefully make a selection from the top to the bottom of the gradient block header.

  5. 5. Go to the menu bar and choose Edit | Copy Merged. Then select File | New and then click on the OK button.

  6. 6. Now go to Edit | Paste.

  7. 7. Then choose menu option File | Save for Web & Devices, making sure that your small gradient selection window is in the forefront. Click on Save, using the settings below, and name the file blockheaderback.gif and save it to the root of your theme directory.

What just happened?

In the last task, you created the gradient background for the block headers of your theme. You took only a very thin slice...