Martin Dougiamas

Two alternative methods for this sort of thing:

1) Every page already contains tags in the body for the course and category (among a bunch of other useful selectors), so you can just have one CSS always loaded in the theme, and set up rules for different courses/categories etc.



2) The admin can create one main theme, and then use it as the base for a number of variations implemented as individual themes. In Admin > Appearance > Themes >Theme settings, turn on allowcoursethemes and allowcategorythemes. This will let your teachers choose a variation from a list.

You guys really need to check this out, it's phenomenal bit of work. Nice one Sam!

We are using the common and stable XML-RPC for more and more things now (browsing and downloading courses from hubs, updating registration info, pushing files to mahara portfolios, and possibly other repositories and portfolios in future), and it would be really nice to know it's there.

However, I do hear that some may not be able to configure PHP with XML-RPC so I'll revert it in the environment check to "recommended" and make sure we put more info in the interface to let you know what will no longer work.

The issue in the tracker with all details is MDL-22964.

The new Backup/Restore in 2.0 is a lot better than 1.0 and we can now backup/restore easily from PHP code.

Even though there are no archiving tools in 2.0 exactly like you describe I'm sure we'll see lots of other addons developed that will implement some funky archiving schemes.

Also note the course overview is just a block now, and can easily be replaced with another custom block.

Possibly something can also be done with a special "Archive" course category that courses get moved into (and then those are ignored on the course overview).

More ideas welcome here.

This feature worked years ago with very old browsers like IE4 and Netscape (and was a cool feature!) but none of the browsers allow this now because it's very insecure to let the web link to files anywhere on your computer. The setting is gone in 2.0.