Themes

Hi Derek,

I believe the following:

• That themes are just one component of the user experience.  That other things like the navigation block and course formats have their part to play.
  
• There are lots of different ways that people want Moodle to operate to suit them.  Thus there is never one size fits all.  So Awesomebar for some but not all etc.
  
• I have become much more skilled in theme development, this shows in improvements to Shoelace and Essential along with the birth and early development of Shoehorn and Campus.  Thus my opinion has changed to be more positive and pragmatic.
  
• That theming has not become too complex and chaotic, its just moved on to use newer technologies and methodologies.  My comments above are to do with one specific area that in reality is technically simple.
  
• You can do far more radical things in contributed themes than in core quickly.  This is the right way as with contributed themes you get something new but comes with more risk.  With core themes you get plain stability to fall back upon when things don't quite work.  I fall back to using 'Clean' all of the time when developing and things break.  It is also a good benchmark in determining if an issue is theme specific or not.

If you have contributed plugins that conflict, then contact the appropriate developers and let them know.  99% of the time it is possible to create completely separated modules that don't conflict.  When conflicts do occur, then fixes can happen in either or both plugins.  Its a matter of being proactive, talking to the developers and helping them to help you.

Gareth

No Derek, themes are not too complex or chaotic, it's just that Moodle is changing the way things have been done. Now we are really moving along at a great pace and the DEVs are working flat out. This in itself is exciting.

The initial reason for this post started off as a way of letting people who, like me want to know about the changes in Moodle 2,9. But as I began to write I stopped briefly to test these new changes and found, to my dismay, that my theme no longer worked the way it had if I emplyed the new code.

But still it is difficult to see if this particular change, to the way the page header is coded, is going to affect the way we code a theme generally. Of course we could just ignore it, and carry on as normal. But if we do, then a new breed of Moodle theme may evolve, in such a way that may hinder our progress rather than enhance it.

For instance; a web designer might want to layout a page in a specific way, and then find that there are elements, within the structure of that page, that are coded in such a way they are difficult to separate and use singularly, because of the different way in which they are coded now.

To me it looks like the Moodle Developers employed to update Moodle, and bringing with it new and exciting building blocks for Theme Designers to use, are themselves finding that Theme design is not easy and that some of the code, that we have been used to and familiar with, was not right and so are changing it.

At the end of the day, I am perhaps worrying about nothing.

Cheers

Mary

P.S. With 'autoloading' I've just tried in Shoelace and could not make it work when I add extra methods to the class.  I get an error pertaining to non-existence of the method in the base class.