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

Correcting some problems


As you have been building your theme, I have noticed a few problems that will need to be sorted out. These have been intentionally left out as a way of getting you (the reader) to try to fix these issues without having the help of guided exercises.

Fixing the .generalbox problem

The first problem that you may have noticed is that in an earlier task you added a gradient background to the .generalbox class to make it look like your sideblocks. This change has created a problem insofar as some of the "generalbox" page elements have text that overlaps the background.

This is because the background gradient that you used is the same as the one used for your sideblocks and is only 32px high. In general, this effect works quite well, but there are other techniques that you could employ to achieve the desired result. You could, for instance, move any overlapping content by giving the .generalbox class a top-padding value. Or better still, you could create a larger (higher) gradient image specifically for the generalbox elements. Give it a go, and try to see if you can come up with an alternative method of sorting out this problem.