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

Moodle for mobile devices


With the proliferation of mobile devices and PDAs loaded with fully-functional web browsers, Moodle has had to keep up with the times. There is a Moodle for Mobile that can be used with basic mobile phones and PDAs, but this lacks graphical elements and is therefore rather difficult to use.

The Orangewhitepda theme

There is also an Orangewhitepda theme that comes with the standard release of Moodle that can be used for mobile devices. This is a low-graphics, large-text theme that again can be customized fully to meet your requirements. The options here are to build a whole Moodle site specifically for mobile devices by using this theme, or to have a link somewhere on the front page of Moodle that loads this theme. To do this, you would need to use session themes, so that a particular theme is loaded for the users based upon the session.

How do we use it?

To do this, two things need to be done. Firstly, you will need to add the following PHP code to the config.php file in the root of your Moodle installation folder. That's right—not the other one in the root of your theme's folder.

$CFG->allowthemechangeonurl = true;

The config.php file is located at: C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs\config.php.

Once you have done this, you can then create a link to your Moodle for Mobile theme somewhere on your home page. When clicked, Moodle would load the orangewhitepda theme only for that session.