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

Fixed versus liquid designs


You may have noticed that we have been discussing fixed and liquid Moodle themes in this section, and you might be wondering what exactly this means. Well, over the last ten years there has been an ongoing debate as to whether websites should be of a fixed width layout or a relative or liquid layout. This argument is likely to continue long into the future.

Fixed width designs

Fixed width designs are websites that are set to a fixed size either via the HTML or the CSS that they use and will remain this size regardless of the size of the visitor's monitor or its resolution. The exercise that you just completed turned your liquid (relative) Moodle theme into one that has a fixed width. A fixed width design doesn't have to be positioned in the middle of the screen (as ours did); it could be easily moved to the left or even to the right.

The benefits of having a fixed width design are consistency and control. The elements of a fixed width design retain their proportions...