Collaborating on a new, more flexible theme for Moodle 2

Theming Moodle

North Coast TAFE Profile

• 17 campuses along the North Coast of New South Wales, Australia

• Diverse age range of learners in Vocational Education and Training, 16 yrs - 60+ yrs

• 700 courses in Moodle 1.9

• 1,341 students online

• Moodle 2 ready for delivery to students, Semester 2 2012

Themes by the dozen!

Why having so many themes is a bad idea• Moodle can assign a theme

per category but on larger Moodle sites this can slow down server performance

• Managing multiple themes requires time

• Manually Synchronising 12 copies of a template will result in errors and omissions

One size doesn’t fit all!

Moodle experience

Novice:

“What’s a link?” Designer:

“Can I apply my own style sheet?”

A Moodle theme is not• Blocks

• Topic Headings and labels

• Activities and Resources within a course

• Course Format e.g. weekly/topic

• Multimedia and word filters

A Moodle theme is• Page width

• Position and size of columns, header and footer

• Position of blocks

• Font, styles and colours

What is a theme?

One Moodle consists of:

• 12 PHP scripts• Around 5 stylesheets • A few dozen images• Thousands of individual CSS

styles

A Moodle theme is tested in

• 50 Moodle PHP pages • 5 operating systems• 5 main browsers • In 3 screen resolutions

• on 3 types of devices .....

And when will it be ready?

• The most important part: Activities and Resources

• These are placed within a course format – The Box

• The Moodle Theme is like the gift wrapping

• The ‘skin’ is like cellophane wrapping over the theme

Your content, gift wrapped

The benefits of inheritance!

Course 57: IT Faculty Branding

Course 52: BusinessFaculty

Branding

Top Level Course: Establishes Institute

Branding

Each new course can inherit settings from a master course AND then make further adjustments. Cascading inheritances maintains branding yet allows for unique design aspects…with no coding required.

To find out more information about North Coast TAFE: northcoast.tafensw.edu.au

For additional information, please contact: natalie.denmeade@tafensw.edu.au

@Moodlemuse