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

Adding a theme screenshot


Another thing that you have probably noticed when you have been selecting themes from your theme selector page is that all of the themes that load have a screenshot so that the administrator can see what the theme looks like. You will probably want to do this as well, not because the normal Moodle user will ever get to see this page but more as a way of making your theme complete. You might also have assigned other administrative users that need to be able to see this page and the themes that your Moodle site has installed.

How do we add a theme screenshot?

Again, this is very easy to achieve, and only requires that you take a screenshot of your theme on its home page and then add this screenshot as a .jpg file into your theme's root folder. Try this out by pressing the Print Screen key on your keyboard and opening a new file in Adobe Photoshop. Paste in the screenshot from your clipboard and use the Save for web & devices menu in Photoshop. This will optimize the image at the same time as saving it, making it more accessible to people with slow Internet connections.