If you're thinking of copying the look of Garland it's worth bearing in mind that despite being GPL'd and now available for Wordpress and other CMSs and blog engines, the original Theme developers got a bit peeved because Wordpress took their theme and released it before they had unveiled it along with Drupal 5. They thought of it as an important part of their brand.
Link for reference: http://acko.net/blog/wordpress-com-copies-drupal-theme
Of course that was a while ago now so maybe it's not so much of an issue.
On another tack, I just spent 20 minutes doing a quick and dirty port of Garland to Moodle and there's going to be some major stumbling blocks if the Moodle HTML isn't able to be changed to match what the theme needs.
For example the stretchy middle column with the overlap onto the header and the gradients fading into the white background requires 3 images: a top-left corner, a repeating horizontal background, and a top-right corner. With current IE level CSS support you need 3 containers to attach these to, 9 if you wanted to do things vertically as well (Safari and--probably Opera now/soon--support CSS3 border-image for doing this more easily). You can nearly fudge the horizontal effect with the one and a half containers that exist at the moment but not quite and it's a lot more work even for a less satisfying result.
It would be good if identifying theme issues like that was the subject of a summer of code project. However there's not much to show for your work unless you also fix the identified problems and then create at least one theme that makes use of the fixes and that's probably way, way outside the scope of a summer project.
David Scotson
Posts made by David Scotson
We were just discussing doing something similar for Course Categories as the top level ones correspond to entire departments (e.g. Physics) for us and in 1.9 you can edit the Category description with arbritrary HTML to easily create a nice landing page. However the links are a bit opaque and tricky to write/read/describe and while manually adding rewrites would work it'd be a bit brittle.
Note also that the idnumber example fails with an error if you have two courses with the same idnumber, I just filed bug MDL-14084 on that.
Note also that the idnumber example fails with an error if you have two courses with the same idnumber, I just filed bug MDL-14084 on that.
The GoPHP5 'movement' seem to be pushing for 5.2 as a common minimum requirement, they exlplain why in their FAQ. They also have lists of other projects and web hosts that have commited to supporting 5.2 from now on.
Thanks for the response, I continued my thoughts over in the General Developers Forum, as I'm not really just thinking about Wikis, but about collaborative editing with history and undo generally in Moodle:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=90237
My main point is that hopefully the code may be reused but for the smoothest possible user experience the built in help, the options and the presentation would ideally be different. And that's not something roles was designed to do.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=90237
My main point is that hopefully the code may be reused but for the smoothest possible user experience the built in help, the options and the presentation would ideally be different. And that's not something roles was designed to do.
I was mentioning, over in the Wiki forum, that the OUWiki with suitable roles would be an excellent place for teachers to collaborate on collections of hyperlinked texts. Thinking about it further, I realised that if I was producing even just a single page of HTML, as you do with the "create a web page" resource, then I'd love to be able to store my edit history. That would allow me to make large edits and know I could easily access previous revisions from any computer, just with my browser.
Even better, because the OUWiki tells you if other people are editing at the same time (and combined with the history) I could work on text with colleagues much more effectively. You can even leave edit comments on each section without touching the actual text (much like the Yellow Post-it tool in Word).
For working within my team, using Moodle as a collaborative tool, I would love to be using the OUWiki for these purposes right now. But I wouldn't really feel able to recommend this to colleagues across campus, as they'd need to fiddle with roles, and students may wonder why some OUWiki's are totally un-interactive (and OUWiki would need to be installed, which would probably require it in core). Ideally all the non-essential parts would be hidden, both from teachers and students so keep it simple and unthreatening and allow them to focus on the text, while still giving them the editing benefits.
Is there any chance that the OUWiki code could be re-used as the basis of a better "create a web page" resource?
(I'm undecided whether leaving the ability to create more than one page is a good thing or not. It means you'd have to tell people to watch out for double square brackets. Maybe in a seperately named module? I can also see how the same underpinnings could work well for a book-like module by forcing a linear progression through the "wiki" pages)
Even better, because the OUWiki tells you if other people are editing at the same time (and combined with the history) I could work on text with colleagues much more effectively. You can even leave edit comments on each section without touching the actual text (much like the Yellow Post-it tool in Word).
For working within my team, using Moodle as a collaborative tool, I would love to be using the OUWiki for these purposes right now. But I wouldn't really feel able to recommend this to colleagues across campus, as they'd need to fiddle with roles, and students may wonder why some OUWiki's are totally un-interactive (and OUWiki would need to be installed, which would probably require it in core). Ideally all the non-essential parts would be hidden, both from teachers and students so keep it simple and unthreatening and allow them to focus on the text, while still giving them the editing benefits.
Is there any chance that the OUWiki code could be re-used as the basis of a better "create a web page" resource?
(I'm undecided whether leaving the ability to create more than one page is a good thing or not. It means you'd have to tell people to watch out for double square brackets. Maybe in a seperately named module? I can also see how the same underpinnings could work well for a book-like module by forcing a linear progression through the "wiki" pages)