Urs Hunkler

Hello Colin,

to Jon's answer I want to add the experiences I made while working with Moodle 1.4.x. I've very soon started to patch the php files to be able to change the Moodle design as needed. If you have got the time to wait for Moodle 1.5 to be released until you start your courses it will be worth. You could start making your first experiences with Moodle 1.5 now - keeping in mind, that the CSS files and the hooks in the php files are not yet ready developed and will be extended and could even be changed until the final release.

Moodle 1.5 will have distinct CSS and XHTML changes. I'm quite confident that Moodle will offer many opportunities for web and interface designers to create phenomenal learning sites - at least I hope so and will do my best to get there

The Emily Carr website looks very interesting and I am looking foreward to see your results. If you have questions or have suggestions or even get into trouble with your Moodle design I will be glad to help if I can.

Urs

On base of the "Cascading Themes" there will also be no need anymore to copy all icons into the theme folder and maintain none or all icons, but a theme designer could just add or replace some.

For accessibility the "title" tag of the LI or DIV must hold the explanations for screenreaders. The texts for the title tag can be maintained centraly in the language packs.

This would be great.

Hi Jon and Martin,

em sizes are relative, they are a good choice. I vote for "em" as the Moodle standard fontsize.

Urs

Hi Tony,

your dicussion appealed me to try something. I like working with pdas and was always wondering, if it's possible to arrange the content of an LMS to fit on the small screen. Why not give it a try:

• For a new course format called "pda" I changed the course table from 3 columns to 3 rows. All page elements are arranged beyond each other, starting with the blocks of the left "column" on top, followed by the content and ending with the blocks of the right "column".
  
• With the theme "orangewhitepda" I introduced a fixed width layout with 240 px width (can be changed), so that much of Moodles content fits onto a pda screen. Many of Moodle's activities are still broader, but perhaps they can be made fitting.
  

I was positively surprised, that those relatively fast made changes could produce an somehow acceptable result on my Sony PDA. I think it's worth to go on with the pda approach. If you want to try I attach the test course I made to start optimizing the CSS for the "quiz" and for the "glossary".

I've put the course format and the theme into the CVS. Please tell me, if these changes take you further.

Good luck
Urs

Hi Ian,

thank you very much for offering your help. In the very moment we are experimenting with the code and the CSS. So there are no rules after which you could work. Please follow the threads here and when we are at the point, that the code can be tested it will be very helpfull when you join in and give your feedback.

Thank you.
Urs