Urs Hunkler

Kudos Mauno, you are a marvelous moderator.

Your cite collection made me smile.

Howard, it's scary how derogatory you talk here about "(boring) commercial clients who actually want everything to look identical" as a Moodle Partner. I hope they don't read your posting.

I answer to your posting because I think it is still symptomatic for many representing Moodle or Moodle development to neglect or not understand the role of corporate design or good user interfaces. Good and consistent user interfaces are a base for good usability. And the usability of a learning environment is a key factor for online learning. You really might be well-advised to accept that facts and act accordingly.

My proposal is to use the Moodle 2.0 theme system and extend the "$THEME->layouts" settings in the theme config.php and create your renderers for your headers and footers.

You may add an item 'includes' = array( 'header' => array( 'theme' => themenametotakeheaderfrom, 'include' => 'header_home.inc.php), 'footer' => array( 'theme' => themenametotakeheaderfrom, 'include' => 'footer_with_special_info.inc.php)) to "$THEME->layouts" and read the config data from your renderer. This way you are flexible to save your includes in any theme and reuse them from any theme or create individual and theme specific ones.

For Moodle 2.0 you might end with the config.php, a styles.css and one or two include files for a client specific theme. All other layouts, icons, files etc. you may take from parent themes. Compared to Moodle 1.9 I see this as a huge advantage.

Thank you very much for your posting showing me that I am not the only one seeing some offensive tenor in Tim's contribution. And it's good to know in such situations to know that there are people thinking similarly.

Tim, I don't understand what you intend with such offensive sentences like "It took major brow-beating by people in this forum (mainly Urs) ...". Do you feel a need to restart our war? Or do you need to make other people down to be able to shine in your developer glory?

The right answer for Howard may have been RTFM. But showing possible solutions is much more productive.

You have done marvelous work and Petr and Sam could build on the base you created. There is no need to complain, to accuse or offend people. The Moodle 2.0 theme system is a good base to work with and to continue building on it to make it even better.

You may go and blame your developer colleagues for crappy work like the course/category... pages. I created the tracker issue MDL-25649 explaining the inconsistencies in some related pages.

These pages are a nightmare for people working with the Moodle user interface. We need to correct each developer fault in CSS individually for each page. And that only because Moodle features are still more important than a consistent user interface and code quality. These topics don't show up in any roadmap.