Contributing by updating an Outdated Theme

Contributing by updating an Outdated Theme

by Ahmed Aly -
Number of replies: 3

Hey Everyone,

I have question that i can't seam to find a direct answer to, is it possible to fork a what it seams to be an abandoned theme , and update it to make it compatible with the latest Moodle 3.6 and making it available on Moodle Repository ? since the original contributors seams to have abandoned it, as the last official version on Moodle repository is was released for Moodle 3.2. and there is another version hosted on GitHub for Moodle 3.3.

I updated it and currently testing it and so far, it works fine under Moodle 3.6 on my test server and i'm planning to update our Production server from 3.5 to 3.6 and include the updated theme as well. so the question is how to best address a situation like this? 


As someone who's currently administrating Moodle in our company and working on acquiring skills on web development, I'm extremely interested on supporting and contributing to the Moodle community.

The theme in question is EduHub


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In reply to Ahmed Aly

Re: Contributing by updating an Outdated Theme

by Dan Marsden -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Plugins guardians Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Yes, go for it! - All themes start as forks of the core Moodle Themes! - just be careful not to remove all the copyright headers and author tags in the existing code - make sure you maintain the original copyright headers/authors somehow and in a readme mention that the theme is a fork of the other theme. (Giving the original theme dev credit for their effort.)

Don't just rename the plugin, change all the headers and make it look like it is all your own work - this might seem obvious but unfortunately themes seem to be a plugin type that (some) people like to plagiarise.

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In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Contributing by updating an Outdated Theme

by Ahmed Aly -

Dan thanks a lot for your reply.

Just another question regarding your comment about changing all headers, do you mean, that i just change the artwork itself? or actually create new landing page for the theme itself?

I mean what i did to theme from my side is pretty minimal.

  • Updated the code to support the new message drawer.
  • Fixed some Jquery errors.
  • Some styling updates.
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In reply to Ahmed Aly

Re: Contributing by updating an Outdated Theme

by Ben Kahn -

Ahmed, you don't need to restyle the app to make it look original. Just make sure you don't delete all the information that makes it clear that the theme is originally someone else's work.

Don't delete "copyright headers and author tags" so you can pass the unchanged theme off as your own. Not that you were going to smile


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