Themes

Thanks Mary - interested to see what you can come up with!

Thanks for your patience Dan.

Well here's the good news...I found out what the problem is.

And the bad news? Well I really don't know where to start.

Whilst the Aardvark theme has gone from strength to strength and has become very popular with Moodlers because it is appealing in that it marries up nicely with Windows based operating systems. Especially Aardvark Aquarium and Windows 7. And in each version errors in its coding have been ironed out, or I had thought so, until the other day.

This version of Aardvark 1.1 Pro( MemMed) has sadly some very old errors in it's coding, and now I am seeing the same errors creeping back into Aardvark-Pro1.5 (Aquarium).

The way the header and footer are written in MemMed, I wonder how it actually worked. But then Moodle has Standard theme as it's back up, and with FireFox and all the other, new breed of intelligent browsers, the flaws are masked and missing bits are added. But use IE8 and all your problems show up for what they are...bad coding. There is no other way to describe it.

I'm learning bit by bit, that you have to follow the code of good practice and even I take short cuts through the Moodle maze of PHP code, but in the end get pulled up and have to re-think/re-write some code to make the page work.

The main problem in your case is that the header and the footer don't match up.

For some reason the footer has a html DOC TYPE which it shouldn't have. It has the #content closing div missing and also the #page ending div too. So the div#page ends at immediately after the menu in the header.html file and the problem cascades down the page.

Like I said a lot of the code is masked, but put the theme through it's paces in IE8 and it breaks.

In looking at your theme, and also another similar theme that someone has emailed me, I have found the cause of strange behaviour with the menu which has been hanging about for ages.

Try resetting a theme using the theme selector when logged in as Admin, in IE8 and you will find the menu collapses. This is due to the badly coded pictureblock (or whatever it's called) which adds the user avatar into the header. Add to this the fact that the menu is missing vital components for it to function correctly, and yet you don't notice anything wrong in Firefox. Amazing!

So if you want to put all this right, I would first advise you to make a copy of standard theme, and rename it to a theme name of your choice. Then replace it's css with the MemMed aardvark css files and image/pix folders too, and then slowly rebuild the header.html and footer.html adding elements from the main theme's header & footer which you are happy with. I am assuming you know some php enough, or at least enough to read it and understand the logic behind it, and can spot inconsistency in its syntax?

You can safely use the same CSS and images as they are not affected.

The thing is with Moodle, you shouldn't need to tinker too much with the layout of the header.html and footer.html, you should be able to achieve all you want with CSS alone.

And all this because you wanted a background image.

I suppose if you went over the header.html and footer.html and put right the missing elements, you could achieve that quite easily.

Hope all or part of this make some sense?

Mary