Themes

Derek, this is a very very difficult question to answer - what is to love about Elegance.

I think, there are few themes which gives you the tools to be productive with visual elements where user have full control over how they can bring out their ideas from keeping the moodle look as simple as it can be to a wow effect, and Elegance and Essential (to my knowledge) are only two of the themes having these qualities. Means specially in these two themes you can turn everything off and no body can tell which theme they are, whilst you can use your productive ideas to make these two themes so much customized that one can't tell if it's a moodle site. for me they are like a Manual transmission, where user have full control over.

Where Essential remains the king of the hill (I am still holding essential for the later shebang) there are plenty other themes (specially emerging since 2013) Like we have Flexibase by Richard, Evolve-D & Pioneer by Chris, BCU, Square and plenty others to mention and yet I cannot still point out the unique things to love about Elegance, or may be Julian must have casted spell over it while developing - "Thou Shall Fall In Love With it, Once You Use it!".

Also regarding forum replies from e-mail - working for me.

P.S: Other Elegance lovers  may not fully agree! So rather I'll wait for their input too.

I agree with Usman - it has some magical charm about it.  Elegance is true to its name - simple, clean and elegant.  In Julian's original release, it includes course tiles and some very cool hover effects which I miss in the later versions but understand that there are issues with both.  (I have since customized a course format to bring back tiles - I need to update it but once I do that, I will push out to the community).

I think the idea of making Moodle less Moodly is what we tend to love about themes.  I myself find Essential too busy but do like some of the new themes.  When Danny left I was starting to look for new themes as I am running Elegance on three sites currently so was extremely happy when Bas took it over and even let me bug him with a wish list!