Hello!
After having used David's workaround to customize my own course CSS styles, see http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=12923 I was looking forward to the new Course Theme facility in version 1.5.
I'm a little puzzled and disappointed in the way Course Themes are going to work in 1.5.
Apparently, all that teachers will be allowed to do is to select a theme that they want to apply to their course from the list of themes made available by Admin on their institution site. Even then, in the 1.5 version I downloaded and tested this week, only a very small subset of that list appears in the teacher's dropdown list Edit Course Settings/ Force theme:, namely: OrangeWhite, OrangeWhitePDA and Standard. And I can't find the Admin setting which restricts this choice... Maybe this is just a thing with the DEV version...
I was looking forward to a more flexible system whereby teachers would be allowed to build their own CSS stylesheets and use them, without having to resort to Admin. Something similar to David's workaround mentioned above. For instance, a \theme folder might be made available in eache Moodledata\course folder, where teachers would be free to upload any personal theme(s) they wish to use for their course.
The reason I wish to customize my course themes is that my courses are built around a number of HTML files, uploaded and used as Resources, which have their own CSS stylesheets and I want to integrate them seamlessly in a compatible environement, not a "jarring" stylesheet imposed on a whole Moodle site by Admin. I know this may sound strange to the many moodlers who work in small institutions where maybe the same person is Admin & Teacher, or where Admin deals with a handful of teachers. My situation is quite the opposite, with one Admin and hundreds of teachers (and thousands of students).
I am looking forward to fellow-moodlers' reactions,
Joseph_R
Themes and stylesheets have changed (and are still changing) a lot in 1.5 dev. What you see is just the first step ... the hard part was getting cascading site/course and user themes working comfortably in the first place using installed themes.
Code-wise adding a GUI stylesheet editor for admins, teachers and users is not hard to do now, and was on my to-do list already. However it's what I would call a feature for quite advanced users and simply less important than basic functionality. On my sites I probably won't be letting every teacher change the theme arbitrarily because I feel the overall navigational experience for students is adversely affected.
By the way the theme menu is short because it only shows 1.5-compatible themes.
Code-wise adding a GUI stylesheet editor for admins, teachers and users is not hard to do now, and was on my to-do list already. However it's what I would call a feature for quite advanced users and simply less important than basic functionality. On my sites I probably won't be letting every teacher change the theme arbitrarily because I feel the overall navigational experience for students is adversely affected.
By the way the theme menu is short because it only shows 1.5-compatible themes.