Urs Hunkler

Helen, do you know a way to import presets in Moodle 1.8.4+? I needed to reopen the bug because the import is not working in Moodle 1.8.4+.

Contentology Manifesto Vs. 1.1
http://digitalpractices.com/2008/01/17/contentology-manifesto-vs-11/

"In this Manifesto, Contentology is a coined word that, in its strictest etymology, could mean “the science of content” or “the study of content”. The word “Contentology” is supposed to make people stop and think for a moment, and if it sounds absurd, then we have to ask ourselves why it sounds absurd."

A very interesting paper about the relation of information and it's surrounding and transporting media.

For example the form in which content is presented influnces it's interpretation.

Good design is not only about motivation but also about helping to understand.

Thanks Mauno for your interesting list. Two links I didn't have before I added to my linklist.

Two fast impressions:

* The theory sites offer much text and few examples. What a pity.
* The BBC home beta shows a usability challenge. They need to keep a strong focus on organizational aspects (very big bars and headlines on top of the blocks, much space surrounding the blocks). The content to noise ratio seams to be less effective than on a well designed fixed page.

There are discussions to change the Moodle page building functions to a class. This would be the base to enable theme designers to overwrite page building functions. And this would be much more than just be able to change the index pages.

Drupal and Joomla use this technique and are extremely flexible.

We may need to build a strong lobby to convince Martin and the core developers to really change weblib for Moodle 2.0.

The best way to convince someone may be to show examples of page layouts which not only look nice but also support learning. Probably integration into institutional and company corporate designs will be a second strong argument.

In the Moodle Tracker you may add your ideas/proposals to "Moodle page optimization" MDL-10665.

Moodle 1.9 "custom_corners" theme speed test

Question A: Does the Moodle core implementation of custom_corners bring advantages over a JavaScript implementation?
Question B: Does the Moodle implementation need optimisation?

For this test I implemented a JavaScript version of custom_corners with the same CSS and graphics as the Moodle implementation.

Comparison of the Moodle implementation and the JavaScript implementation of custom corners (CC):
Computers: MacBook 2GHz Intel Dual Core and 1.8 GHz AMD PC
Browser: Firefox 2.0.12, IE7 on the PC
Times taken in a Moodle course page with the Firefox YAHOO YSLOW extension are averages of many repetitions.

Course reload Mac PC	JavaScript CC 2.1 sec 6.2 sec	Moodle CC 1.8 sec 5.8 sec	Standard theme 1.3 sec 2.9 sec
History back Mac PC	JavaScript CC 1 sec 3 sec	Moodle CC 0.6 sec 2.5 sec	Standard theme 0.3 sec 1.2 sec

On the slower PC the page display is slightly different with the JavaScript implementation: you see the page change when the graphics are shown after the page has loaded.

In IE7 the page load is remarkably interrupted with the JavaScript version.

Answer A: Yes, the Moodle implementation brings remarkable advantages. The Moodle implementation is faster. The JavaScript implementation suffers from a worse user experience - especially in IE browsers.

Answer B: Yes, the Moodle implementation needs to be optimised. The speed difference against the standard theme is too big - especially on slower computers.