Hi,
recently I started working with the CMS Textpattern. It offers an integrated CSS webform. This could be the Moodle way too to go for easy CSS editing, couldn't it?
You can click on the image to see a bigger one in a new tab/window.
Urs
I'm a bit skeptical of Textpattern's CSS editor. For anyone who actually understands CSS I can't see it being an improvement over their desktop tools (whether that means vi or CSSEdit or Dreamweaver) followed by a file upload.
On the other hand, for absolute beginners, who just want the basic theme in their 'corporate' colour-scheme plus a customised logo this is way overkill. The current ability to upload logo.jpg and have it appear automatically combined with the previously discussed 'colour sets' (where a small number, say between 1 and 4, colours can be specified via a web interface and inserted--or 'cascaded'-- into the CSS).
There is also the possibility of leaving these choices to user preference, to aid those with impaired vision (amongst others), but, without wanting to sound like a broken record, this will be all be impossible if the styles continue to be defined anywhere else but in CSS.
Hi David,
as you say it doesn't make much sense to take it over to Moodle identically. I liked the interface and I am shure it is useful for small and fast changes. Used as a filter to show up some basic adjustments and to hide the complex CSS file/s in the background I see a chance to get rid off the need to use php within the CSS file/s.
By the way David, did you get the e-mail I sent you privately? I didn't hear from you and I wonder, if you got it. Could you please be so kind to give me a hint? Thank you very much.
Urs
Yes I did, apologies for the delay in responding. I'm still catching up on a backlog of mail from the holiday period.
I use textpattern for my personal page www.streetdaddy.com and the CSS is very fragile. I can use the textpattern textarea to edit the CSS ok, but if I try to edit it in the advanced editor it screws up my CSS completely. I didn't bother to investigate what it screwed up but the editor didn't look all that useful anyway...
I agree that a CSS webform could provide low-end users the ability to make formatting changes to the interface, but in a lot of cases the syntax might be a bit to much of a learning curve. If you did know the syntax well enough then you'd probably prefer to edit CSS in a good desktop app and rely on a basic textarea on a webform to edit the CSS inline in an emergency.
Making formatting changes seems better off being more intuitive options, like a form with:
- page background image : |__________| |Browse|
- position on page : o Left o Right o Top o Bottom
- background color : (insert color palette here)
- etc. and let Moodle write the CSS definition,
rather than expecting a newbie to enter something like 'background: #FFF url("/imgs/picture.gif") no-repeat top left;' without making a syntactical error...
I agree that a CSS webform could provide low-end users the ability to make formatting changes to the interface, but in a lot of cases the syntax might be a bit to much of a learning curve. If you did know the syntax well enough then you'd probably prefer to edit CSS in a good desktop app and rely on a basic textarea on a webform to edit the CSS inline in an emergency.
Making formatting changes seems better off being more intuitive options, like a form with:
- page background image : |__________| |Browse|
- position on page : o Left o Right o Top o Bottom
- background color : (insert color palette here)
- etc. and let Moodle write the CSS definition,
rather than expecting a newbie to enter something like 'background: #FFF url("/imgs/picture.gif") no-repeat top left;' without making a syntactical error...