Hi all
I read through the entire earlier thread on this: Interesting, quite a lot of "off topic" stuff , but couldn't actually find an example. Perhaps I missed it among the rhetoric.
Anyone got away from the three-column layout, Moodle at 20 paces look?
No, I'm not trying to plagiarize anything, nor am I ashamed of using open source, IE or indeed any tool that's available, before you ask...
Richard Jones
Te Wananga o Aotearoa
With the many changes to the underlying HTML made in the most recent release you should find it relatively easy to customize Moodle if you know some CSS. It's pretty much a matter of how much effort you want to put in, as there is no longer a barrier to making changes to the site in the same manner as the multiple themes preseneted in the CSS Zen Garden. Personally, I'm not a fan of looking different for it's own sake in a web application such as Moodle, as it reduces the usefulness of community documentation and testing if every site is radically different.
For example, I like the look of the http://corporacion.campusadalid.com/ Moodle site. It's perhaps not extreme-ly different in layout but it is very well done and avoids what I believe is the number one Moodle-ism, namely putting a solid, dark border around almost everything. The newer 1.5 themes seem to generally avoid this, but it was a common theme(!) for 1.4.
I've also been experimenting with 2-column layouts, the first of which is called Kubrick, based on the ubiquitous Wordpress blog theme of the same name. Again, I think it's the removal of borders that does most to make it look un-Moodle while keeping the vast majority of the layout intact. (There's plenty of digressions in that thread too, you may want to just scroll down to look at the various screenshots or download the latest version of the theme).
To add to this discussion check out kubrick in action at:
http://playpen.monte.nsw.edu.au
Another theme tyring to jazz up the core design alittle is Clouds. It can be seen at:
http://montenet.monte.nsw.edu.au
The design of Moodle is relatively set due to the functionality it is designend to offer. And it should be noted there is a slowly growing group of theme developers starting to play with theme design ideas.
Hi David, Julian
Many thanks for the useful information; those are interesting themes.
Regards
Richard
David,
I am so impressed by your work on the Kubrick theme. 
I notice in the original discussion you referred to stealing leveraging the wealth of open CSS themes out in the blogosphere and beyond - how hard is this? Is it better to start from the standard theme or could one steal leverage your work on Kubrick as a starting place? Any pointers as to how to get started on the process of taking a wordpress theme and producing a Moodle equivalent would be gratefully received!
This is, I assume, a process that requires a fair degree of manual input, and css and moodle knowledge, and is thus not something that a script could do?
Unfortunately the work is rather more involved than something that could be automated. You're really taking the design ideas, rather than the just CSS code, and translating them so that they make sense in the context of Moodle. On the other hand, if you look at a variety of Wordpress (or Moodle) themes you start to see a distinct pattern, that basically suggests all you need is a header, a footer and a repeating vertical motif in between. I confindently predict that, as a result of the CSS changes made for 1.5, there will soon be a body of Moodle Themes from which to draw, and that subtle variations of these will suffice for most people. That was part of my thinking in choosing Kubrick, as the distinctive blue blob can be personalised with an image simply by uploading to the Moodle file area. The rest of the theme is non-descript enough for this to transform the look of your site.
My masterplan, which I've not had much time to devote to recently, is to take the Kubrick theme for Moodle and break it down into its component parts to make it easier to steal, leverage, and learn from individual parts of it e.g. you may want to have stripey tables and new-style tabs without 2-columns and fixed width.
Or, on a simpler level, you may just want to take everything blue and make it green, red, purple etc. Hopefully this kind of change will be so easy that anyone can do it since the color stuff will all be broken out and logically arranged together in a single file.
To test that I've broken it down properly, I intend to create a final Kubrick theme, and one based on it's sequal K2 and another popular Wordpress theme, maybe Fresh Bananas (can't quickly find an example but you can see it in the Wordpress theme browser if you select it from the dropdown). These will all be using the same 'foundation' CSS but with a different facade creating a substantially different 'look' without, hopefully, changing the 'feel' too much. I'd hope that theme designers would also be able to build on that same foundation (and contribute fixes to it where problems are found).
(I'll also need to take a look at the block column code before two-column themes can really hit the mainstream.)
edit: Miles's post appears to be linking to a variety of glossary definitions in the Thai Moodle course. Is anyone else seeing this? edit2: it's stopped now. Very strange.
Hi Matt,
correct URL for the truly lovely css Zen Garden site is http://www.csszengarden.com/
All the best,
Joseph
I did an extreme make-over (working!) of my previous ELO (TeLeTOP). It had a central Rostar-scheme with only assignments and a pattern of labels (what to do as student..)
Hi Julian
I am interested in creating the dropdown menu you've done in http://www.automotive-academy.com. I use CMS on my sites, but that takes up too much space on the home page, reducing it to a drop-down - like you've done - would be great.