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—checking our setup


  1. 1. Open up your Moodle site with the current theme (which should be blackandblue but looks like the Autumn theme).

  2. 2. Navigate to your blackandblue theme's folder, right-click on the user_styles.css file, and choose Open. This file should be completely blank.

  3. 3. Type in the following line of CSS for the body element, and then save the file:

    body {
    background: #000000;
    }
    
  4. 4. Now refresh your browser window. You will see that the background is now black.

    Note

    Note: When using Firebug to identify styles that are being used, it might not always be obvious where they are or which style is controlling that element of the page. An example of this is the body {background: #000000;}code that we just pasted in our user_styles.css file. If we had used Firebug to indentify that style, we would not have found it. Instead, I just took a look at the CSS file from the Autumn theme. What I am trying to say here is that there will always be an element of poking around and trial...