David Scotson

I noticed that the user images are saved at a relatively high quality and wondered if there was any point in lowering it. Going from 90 to say 80 might halve the size of the images without any perceptible quality loss. But how would you go about measuring the impact of this?

Is there any easy way to check logs and see what percentage of total data transferred on a typical site is user images? And how could you quantify how much time is spent dowloading these on forum pages or other areas with long lists of users

Moodle sets the height of these images so the layout of the page shouldn't be held up, but simply the number of image requests might be a bottleneck. Though again Moodle is pretty good about setting appropriate cache headers so these should only need to be downloaded once.

Actually, to get some rough idea about the impact of this I ran Google's pagespeed service on the the main page of the Hardware and Performance forum and got a couple of surprising results,

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=https_3A_2F_2Fmoodle.org_2Fmod_2Fforum_2Fview.php_3Fid_3D596&mobile=false

Firstly, the profile images served by Moodle could be made 24% smaller (losslessly!) by recompressing them.

Secondly, a bunch of the profile images are actually served by Gravatar but strangely, many of them are actually just the same "no profile image" placeholder, but served from different URLs e.g.

https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/64d2ead6d7adfe7218ca33cf43ffff51?s=35&d=mm
https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/01231d9860393374101568a3a9f2fed0?s=35&d=mm

And those images are only cached for 5 minutes.

I don't really know much about Gravatar, or Moodle's integration with it, but that seems like some kind of bug to me. Actually, after a bit of Googling, it seems like fallout from fixing this bug:

https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-35669

(There also seems to be a "moodleofficial" plugin that's doing a couple of weird things -- adding a border to the image rather than achieving the same effect via CSS, and putting a ? in the image url -- but that's of less relevance for ordinary Moodle users)

A screenshot of the new look I'm trying in Moodle

Sorry, a bit of bootstrap lingo there. In Bootstrap they have a bunch of things known as navs, which are in HTML terms unordered lists, but by applying different classes such as nav-tabs or nav-pills, you can have different presentations.

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html#navs

At the end of that section you get something called a nav-list, which is a grey box (aka a well) with a title and a list of links that mapped pretty well to the Moodle block concept.

For bootstrap 3 they've simplified this, so nav-list now gives you something that looks like what is referred to in the current docs as a "stacked" nav-tabs.

However, since asking my question I replaced everything that used nav-list in a .well with .nav-pills .nav-stacked in a .well and it's more than acceptable to me, though it might need some tweaking of padding and margins.

I've begun the upgrade process for taking in the changes from the (currently unfinished and unreleased) Bootstrap version 3 and adding them to my bootstrap_renderers theme.

The biggest positive change so far is the production of their own icon font, and the expansion of icon coverage.

Talking of which, I've created an enhancement request for creating an icon font from the new Moodle SVG icons:

http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-37231

The biggest negative change (for me at least) is that they no longer have a nav-list design that maps neatly onto Moodle's block concept. If anyone out there has a design background then I'd be interested in suggestions for how to bridge the gap between what Moodle has and what they provide now.

You can see my work in progress here:
https://github.com/ds125v/moodle-theme_bootstrap_renderers/tree/bootstrap3

And the main Bootstrap project's here:

https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/tree/3.0.0-wip

Checking again in the latest 2.4, deselecting Workshop and Quiz seems to let the rest run as expected. In 2.3 you need to deselect Lesson as well.