General help

The easiest way would be to add atheme to your Moodle that has the coding for the drop down menu bar already part of the theme. You would merely need to go in and add the tabs in the way that you wanted them to be. Many of the Aardvark themes have that menu bar. Here are the steps to take ...

1. Verify that you have access to the servers side of your Moodle because you will need to add the theme into the theme folder after you get the tabs added into the theme's code. If you don't have access, locate who would be responsible for adding files to the server side of Moodle for you.

2. Look through the themes in the Moodle theme database for one that has the menus and is compatible with 1.9. Download it to your computer and customize the tabs per the instructions in the theme zip file (after you unzip it). If you have a local install of Moodle on your desktop, it is helpful to do testing on the theme by activating it there and tweaking it from your own machine before moving it to your production server, especially since updating the tabs may mean changing the code in the theme a little.

3. Upload it to your server in the themes folder and go in to your Moodle's admin panel and select the new theme under appearances.

If you feel courageous and you are willing to go a little beyond just customizing the tabs, you can customize a lot more while you are under the hod with your new theme such as changing the background and adding your own logo. Those changes are generally no harder than addding tabs if you look through the theme's documentation or browse through the theme's forum thread for tips. Our Moodle 1.9 site is a customization of the Aardvark theme that I did last June. We will be moving to Moodle 2 in the summer of the coming year, so I will be back under the theme customizing hood again before too long since 1.9 themes are not compatible with 2.0plus Moodle's.

Hi.

If you want you can go to http://www.professoreraddi.org/scuola/mod/resource/view.php?id=69

This is a lesson (i'm sorry but is only in italian) for my personal solution to this problem.

I've used the aardvark-stf theme for moodle 1.9: this support the top menu and it's very simple to customize menu items.

See you...

Oh, on a side note or two ...

Menus that are hover activated -These hover types of menus are difficult for mobile users to do at the moment because iPads don't do hover very well yet. If you know that you have many iPad users, aim for a click/activated menu type so that they will not find navigation to be difficult. Or go with the hover type menues and provide a click alternative (maybe some linked graphics in the top block) temporarily until iPads catch up in that development area.

If you know that you will be moving to Moodle 2.0 plus before much longer, hold off on retheming your 1.9 version since all that work will not carry forward to the new version. Instead, start working with selecting and customizing your Moodle 2 version on you local machine so that it is ready to go when you move to the new version.

Personally, I am leaning toword customizing the Zebra theme because it changes its layout as you narrow the page down so that iPad and iPhone users have a layout that works for them. That helps Netbook users too. On occassion, I have had to rely on my Netbook (I don't have an iPad) while traveling or when technology gremlins have hit my internat access. The small screens can surely benefit from responsive layouts like Zebra has. It has the menus you were interested in; though, they are hover-based and point one above will need to be considered until the mobile programmers can figure out how to get hover menus to work easily with touch-based screens. I am pretty confident that is just a matter of time.

Another advantage to the Moodle 2 themes is they have a plethora of setting controls built into the settings system. You may very well be able to avoid having to mess with any hand-coding changes with a Moodle 2 theme and instead will be able to work through a guided button-click from inside of Moodle type of customizing experience. Moodle 2 is much easier to work with for theming.