I just skimmed through that thread. I was wondering why there aren't Moodle template clubs. We are members of 4 joomla theme/extension clubs right now and it's nice to have that to pull from. I usually start with a stock theme and hack away at it...but even the most basic joomla templates are flexible because of the joomla framework. Add something like Gantry to it and it's even more so. Anyway, I'm rambling now. We're moving TO moodle from a hosted system (or no system at all), so we're happy so far, even WITH the limitations.
I would second that Brian, a Gantry or Warp setup would be great. Not too sure it will ever happen given the stark differences between the existing moodle tempalte engine and those, but that would definitely go along way toward improving the layout options in Moodle.
Hi Brian,
I am an old joomla template club member too and we were discussing about different template and grid systems in theme forums a couple of years ago (2008-2010) very intensively. I was also testing Gantry inside "early versions of moodle 2.0" and the main problem was that moodle has a built-in YUI library that you can't "switch off" - and Gantry is using Mootools that had and most likely still has conflicts with YUI. So it was/is possible to create a separate "theme css admin page" (outside moodle) to create settings for Gantry based themes and use these settings as a part of Moodle Themes but it was not possible to use Gantry itself as a part of moodle themes. After my testing period I even sent email to Andy Miller (CEO/Founder/Head Kahuna of RocketTheme Team - creator of Gantry) and asked if they were interested in adding a Moodle Club to http://www.rockettheme.com/ but obviously Gantry development for Joomla and WordPress was taking most of their resources and even if RocketTheme has currently also a phpBB3, Magento and Drupal Template Club (sunsetting this year) their main interest was/is to create great looking Joomla and WordPress themes for growing markets. If you compare for example features of http://www.rockettheme.com/joomla-templates/cerulean to current core themes of moodle we are now near the same situation that RocketTheme templates were before they implemented Gantry...
Basicly all moodle themes can be set to use layouts like http://demo.rockettheme.com/joomla25/cerulean/features/module-positions and you can create responsive layouts for moodle themes with lots of css and hard work and studying how different parts of moodle are using different css classes and ids - or add new theme settings - it may just take months/years to make moodle work like http://demo.rockettheme.com/joomla25/cerulean/
... and there it is... Thanks Mauno...
If you would like to do something about this, head over to the themes forum, and help out with what Amy Groshek is attempting: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=216519
Yes, of course I can try to help there and I will - Amy, Mary, Danny, David, You and other people in theme forum have collected many good ideas to make moodle themes better. My comment was just a simple explanation why templating frameworks like Gantry and Warp can't be used directly with moodle.
You can do a lot with plain CSS and even more by moving forward to HTML5 but one essential element of UI design is also javascript and this is partly connected to https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=188627 and some other discussions that Stuart Lamour started.
Things like Bootstrap were not originally meant to be used on top of YUI - to make Bootstrap as fast and reliable as possible you should use it without YUI reset-base-moodle base-custom theme css overwriting chains. YUI css files have the contextual version, CSS Reset's rules should be applied to nodes that descend from a node with a class value of .yui3-cssreset only - not everywhere:
<div class="yui3-cssreset">...</div>
I can't even tell in which yui widgets yui reset is actually needed and why default styles of HTML elements need reset - we have dropped support for IE6 a long time ago and other (modern) browsers render css almost equally. It's a pain to overwrite hundreds of css rules just to notice that it breaks again in the 4th list element - ask Mary about different YUI reset css bugs and she might see red
Bootstrap has also jQuery plugins that "bring Bootstrap's components to life" ( http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/javascript.html ) but since "jQuery" is a really Bad Word for some core developers it is banned like all other optional javascript libraries - you should use yui and nothing else but yui in moodle... so the only option to bootstrap javascript plugins might be http://jshirley.github.com/bootstrap/javascript.html
Most common joomla template frameworks use either jQuery or Mootools - or both - for example Warp that Troy mentioned is using jQuery and Mootools for changing settings in administration and for creating different vivid effects and widgets on pages - see more details from pages like http://www.yootheme.com/themes/warp-framework or http://www.yootheme.com/demo/joomla/drive . And surely Yui widgets could be used as well if somebody just had the time and knowledge to create from a scrach a similar templating framework with YUI3.
The only "exception" in moodle 2, mymoodle theme, is using mobile jquery on top of yui and it was accepted to core only because YUI had no mobile options available.
Moodle 2 themes had many major improvements compared to moodle 1.X themes, for example output renderes, configurable settings, cache and free selection of layouts Special Thanks to You, Tim, and Petr & Sam. The unfinished parts can be added to moodle 3, right?
My experiments so far have yet to find a place where the YUI css actually has any effect. I've not yet found a way to simply not load it from within a theme though. I've deleted it from core Moodle though and not been able to tell the difference. (To be exact, the default font changed, but if your theme sets the font then you won't notice).
FYI Joomla 3.0 uses bootstrap and they are making a new javascript manager to deal with the use of mootools along with jquery. I don't know what RT's plans are with gantry, but I have to wonder if they aren't going to move toward jquery/bootstrap or continue just rolling their own framework with mootools on top of it. I guess we'll see what happens in the coming months.