Preface

A long time ago, we could specify the most appropriate resolution where your user can have a nice experience with the website when we designed themes for it. We could design our themes, considering that they will look great for a specific resolution and just include a notice indicating that unless the user displays the website with a resolution of 800-by-600 pixels, it was their fault if they have a horrible user experience. However, those times are over. Nowadays, we have to design themes that are capable of working with different resolutions, screen sizes, screen orientations, and pixel densities. Our themes must be responsive, and the users must be able to have a great user experience, no matter what device they use to access our website.

These requirements are extremely important when we design modern Moodle themes. We cannot use the same recipes that worked OK a few years ago. We need new recipes that consider the requirements for excellent user experiences with any devices. Smartphones, tablets, phablets, ultrabooks, all-in-one computers, retina displays, high-DPI displays, and smartTVs can access our Moodle courses. Our Moodle themes must be ready to provide an excellent user experience in all these displays. We cannot design themes for just a few screen resolutions anymore.

This book will teach you how to design themes, considering  all the requirements for what is known as the post-PC era.

When theming, we must bear in mind many items, because we may want to change completely the look and feel of our Moodle course, but first of all we need to organize how to do it. We need to start from some basic concepts to bear in mind before taking the first step. We need to focus on small targets and then on the general look of the course. Therefore, in this book we will cover several aspects that we need to know about theming. We will deal with the free version of MoodleCloud, which has another version that is paid and offers more possibilities than the free one. But throughout the book, when referring it to MoodleCloud, we will be making reference to the free and open source one. Bearing in mind that MoodleCloud is not the only cloud-hosted Moodle hosting, we need to know that there are many services that host Moodle, and so users can download Moodle 3 and install to their own server space and also select a Moodle hosting service--many of which allow one to select from dozens of themes--and the themes are customizable. Whereas in this book, when talking about Moodle we will deal with Moodle on-premises, and we will learn how to customize it.

Through the chapters of the book we will start a journey through the land of theming and we will learn some information that will help us to create, design, and improve the theming of our courses. We will deal with icons, images, screen resolutions, responsive themes, among other relevant items that enhance the Moodle themes. Furthermore, we cover different devices and emulate them in order to check what the theme looks like in them. We learn how to code basic HTML and CSS with the help of online editors that help and teach us how to do it. We learn where to find themes and layouts for the Moodle courses and we also explore how to customize at the MoodleCloud maximum level, taking into account that we deal only with the free and open source version. Last but not least, we put all the pieces together, and in the last chapter we recap everything that we have explored, and we can spice our Moodle Course, with some tips that let us theme our course, adding some blocks, for instance, in order to continue changing the look and feel of our course.