Hi, Urs and David,
David > Actually, as an information designer, it's much easier for me to work with layout, font and colour in the same file.
Same for me. First thing I did when I started to build my own theme was to bring all CSS rules into one unique file. When you re-design the look of an object you need to have font, color and layout available in the same place, not scattered over 3 or 4 files.
Urs > When you work with three files, you may keep the styles_layout.css from standard. With this file you are sure, that your theme will not break completely after a Moodle update. This technique has several times proven to be useful.
You are quite right, the styles_layout.css file has to refer to standard theme to avoid problems when standard theme is significantly re-designed (as happened between 1.5 and 1.6).
Well, may I suggest a solution "in-between", which I am using at the moment:
- in your own theme, if you prefer working that way, put all the rules into one unique CSS file
- in your own theme's config.php file, make sure you refer to the standard theme's styles_layout.css file:
$THEME->standardsheets = array('styles_layout');
Hope that helps,
Joseph