I was undecided which of Essential or Elegance or Aardvark or Cubed to do next. I was interested at the conversation over in the discussion where people were welcoming Bas as the new developer for Elegance. I asked what all the buzz was about Elegance and I was told it's an existential thing, magic, and little with any logic or rationality. Certainly no specifics like "Combination of features", "flexibility", "feature X" etc.
So next I'll look at Elegance. https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=theme_elegance
The discussion (which yesterday reached 100 posts in one thread) is here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=322159#p1293495
But apologies in advance. As usual, this is a fragmentary and random post.
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Fonts and design
I now really like serif font (See my comments on Snap) and so I tweaked Elegance just to see what would happen.
With this:
body {
font-family: "Georgia",serif;
font-size: 25px;
line-height: 1.5;
color: #333;
background-color: #fff;
} The result is a little chaotic - as an amateur I cannot figure out how to target the content on the page and leave the headings in sans serif. But I prefer the serif. So some of the screen shots that follow have a non standard font.
Demo site
Bas has a great demosite you can go to to look at Elegance. http://test.sonsbeekmedia.nl/ it is linked to from here: https://docs.moodle.org/30/en/Elegance_theme
First, Front page in Elegance
A choice someone has made: feature "Messages" on the top Menu Bar. I'd suggest tool tips could easily be "modernised" I could not find an option to turn this OFF. If you don't use this much or at all, then this is clutter.
Top Nav is optionally displayed with settings, and I like the choice of being able to switch bklack and light backgrounds. I far prefer black.
I'd prefer the admin functions buttons to not be white. (See below) I like the dark colours in Snap.
Top Marketing spot
As far as I can tell, comparing some themes and the size of the image or slider on the front page:
- Pioneer: HUGE
- Essential: Large (More the size of Moodle.org)
- Elegance: Small, discrete
- Snap: HUGE
You'll see what it looks like in the demo site. http://test.sonsbeekmedia.nl/
Feature request: have a set of images in the default install. OK, we will all ditch these if we want touse the theme for real. But a nice set of defaults will help get a quick feel for the theme in the first time we play with it. The same goes for Logo. Insert a default Logo that says "Default Logo".
Next feature request: always indicate the ideal size/expected size for anything inn the settings. I uploaded a logo with the specified size (30 px high) but it did not say anything about width. Massiv fail.
General appearance
Has a max width setting. (With sensible advice of a range of sizes)
Has three choices of blocks locations in settings. I did not test these out to see what implications there were.
Links colour: the default is far too faint
This I did not notice where this was set in the first few times through the settings. Plus: being able to set the links colour. Many themes you can't.
Navigation: administration
I found at 100% in my monitor the pop out nav menu was too narrow. (Sorry for the faint text in the links, this was before I found out how to change it)
Lots of scrolling. Nothing in this theme to solve this. FIVE clicks to change from one settings page to another. As is really really strange in Moodle (and I think this is core not a theme issue) there are links in the breadcrumbs that are not clickable.
On one screen it works like this, so the admin search field is only one click away. A little better.
Feature request: PUT AN ADMIN SEARCH BOX SOMEWHERE NICE, like top right on every screen always. If you are going to use the traditional Moodle navigation, at least have a search box quickly accessible.
Forums
I'd have some suggestions for layout and design.
The top button is white. The bottom button is blue. I much prefer the snap buttons which are all the same (darker) colour.
Top
Bottom:
ALSO: Why have two lines for the move and display dropdowns, rather than one? Maybe the left justify is a choice. I prefer as little screen space/distance at the top as possible. On the other hand you could argue that you always need to scroll anyway in a forum page.
Forum posts
Here is where I do prefer a smaller and more discrete user picture. And again: so many non-clickable links. You will also see here the implications of my choice of serif font. Some of the headings are sans serif, some not. Links are serif.
Random links in admin view
I could compare Snap/Pioneer etc, each of which have made some choices in various buttons to expose (rather than have it all in a standard Moodle menu) For example, one click to change course description, add a section etc.
There are not many random links in Elegance. There may be non.
Video
I'm interested in this (below) which I have not played with yet. I wonder what this means, and if it works properly in responsive mode? ie you may want 50% in a laptop, but 100% in a smart phone.
In conclusion
I think it may well be that people choose a theme and then set about customising it to their liking. I see all these questions in the forum "How can I remove the space after the widgit?" etc. I was surprised to notice we now have more than 20 CSS hacks in the theme in my main site, each tweak inserted over 11 months since our move to 2.8. I've also had contact with some sites who have a designer (as opposed to a coder) tweak things. This could be the appeal of Elegance: a great basis to do your tweaking?
But: now that I've seen what features can be in a theme out of the box, with some representative themes where they appear:
- Branding at the course level (ie teachers choose the banner) in Pioneer
- Beautiful styling of fonts (Snap)
- Built in navigation between sections (Snap)
- Thumbnail images to go with courses (Pioneer)
- Special message to everybody when you log in. (Pioneer)
This is just an few examples. My old friends at UC used to dread feature creep. But it's not feature creep if it exists somewhere. I now would like some of these in the next theme we choose.
I am also interested in particular following Mary's comments about Base. "Boring" !@#$% What will happen when coders loose interest? https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=318457#p1300564
Moodle should have dropped off Base theme in 3.0
If any one needs it the can download from plugins database.
As I have said in MDL-51580 we hardly get any questions about the older themes in the Themes forum.
We made the transition from 1.9 to 2.0 without too much agrivation. In fact it was good fun...I learnt lots about themes then. Now it's getting more technical...and a little boring.
I don't have any qualms about losing Base at all.
Cheers
Mary
And the discussion about renderers. (Whatever they actually are) https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=323798
What's a simple, easy to use, reliable, up to date and not too time consuming to implement way ahead for themes? We now have so many good themes, and a LOT of work seems to be going in to duplicate work because 'roll our own' seems to be what people actually like doing. What features and functionality to put into themes? I've felt a little critical of both of the user testing I've looked at in the last month. Simplistic and full of assumptions. The question of what cluster of functions to put in a theme and the settings does not have an easy answer. One person's essential is another person's trivial or worse, not wanted. One person's feature is another person's annoyance or even a bug. I have also appreciated Richard and Gareth's comments as theme coders.
Three themes so far that I have installed for 3.0. . .- one has any attention to navigation issues (Snap with it's section navigation and pop out menus)
- one has alternative styling with choice of fonts (Snap)
- one has thumbnails for courses built in (Pioneer)
- Two have ditched the "lines and boxes" Moodle look (Pioneer and Snap)
- one has an "All users message box" Pioneer
I plan a 'review' of Essential next, then Decaf. After this I am open to any suggestions.
-Derek