960px fixed-width show-and-tell

960px fixed-width show-and-tell

by Patrick Malley -
Number of replies: 3
I have been spending a lot of time on a 960px fixed-width theme for Moodle and am coming near a finished product. I have to give a lot of credit to David Scotson for his Kubrick theme, which my theme is loosely based. Images for the background of this theme are from a Joomlashack theme that I purchased in the fall.

What I have created is a 3-column theme with a solid-structured left-column for navigation, and a "floating" right-column block structure for dynamic items such as "who's online", "messages", "calendar", etc. My experience has been that students frequently get lost in all of the blocks on a page. By seperating static content from dynamic content within the blocks, I hope to get rid of some of that confusion.

I have a lot of work left to do on this theme in the course pages and modules, but thought I would share this screenshot with you all as proof of Moodle's flexibility.

96mph

The breadcrumb navbar had to be moved to accomodate the new header . . .

Breadcrumb
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Patrick Malley

Re: 960px fixed-width show-and-tell

by Don Schwartz -
Nice work!
The static / dynamic separation makes alot of sense.  Love to hear about your user acceptance when it launches.
On a side note.  Check your joomlashack license to verify that you are able to reuse the graphics.  Quite often the graphics are tied to a single server instance of the template.  Purchasing a template does not always give one the right to the included graphics.
I know that one template I used for mambo awhile back specified that the images, navigation and design could not be altered or used elsewhere.  Only on the domain it was purchased for and only within the pre-designed template.  Changing the color of icons would have violated that license because the artist wishes to protect their design integrity.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)
In reply to Don Schwartz

Re: 960px fixed-width show-and-tell

by Patrick Malley -
Thanks for the input, Don. In creating this, I was more interested in seeing if it would work than if it was legal. Now that I like it so much, I intend to use it. Thanks for the heads up.

A quick search found the joomlashack "Terms of Service": http://www.joomlashack.com/terms-of-service.html

According to Joomlashack:
  1. I can use the template in any way that I want as long as I use it on only one site.
  2. "You are authorized to make any necessary modification(s) to our products to fit your purposes."
  3. I will need to give them credit for the image files which I intend to do.
  4. I cannot distribute this theme amongst the Moodle community when I am finished.
This is all good. Thanks again for making me look into this before I went any further. Could have been heart-breaking!

Will keep you posted.
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