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

Downloading the Moodle features demo


One of the best ways to test your theme is to download and install the Moodle features demo course. This course has been built specifically to display and demonstrate all of the different features that Moodle has to offer, and therefore can be used as a tool to test your theme in every possible circumstance.

Installing the Moodle features demo

Connect to the Internet and navigate to Moodle.org, and then browse to About | Demonstration site (in the top menu).

Once you are in the Moodle demonstration site, scroll down to the English category, and click on the Moodle Features Demo link. This will take you to the Moodle features demo course. Moodle might ask you to log in and if it does, then log in as "admin" with the password as "demo". You will then be taken to the Moodle features demo page, and in the top left-hand sideblock, there will be a link to download the Moodle features demo course. If you cannot see this block, then it could have been deleted by other users. The Moodle features demo course is reset every hour on the hour, so if it's not there, you might have to try again after an hour.

Download this demo to your desktop or somewhere that you know where it is. Now go back to the Moodle site and create a new course, and then restore the Moodle features demo to this course. I am assuming that you know how to do this, but if you don't, there are plenty of tutorials and documentation on Moodle.org.

As you can see from the previous screenshot (not the whole course), all of the Moodle features are present here.

Testing all of the features with our new theme

Now that you have the Moodle features demo course installed, you can use this to test all of the features of your theme. This is a great way to test, as there is nearly always something that goes wrong in the theming process that could be overlooked if you don't check every feature thoroughly in all of the most popular browsers.

So go ahead and open Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari for Windows and test each feature, one at a time, in all these four web browsers. You are not testing functionality here, just your theme and how it looks for all of the Moodle features.