David Scotson

Thanks for the feedback Chardelle, I'll do my best to sort out any problems you encounter. Here's some quick responses.

• I tried a quick fix for the footer thing in preview release #3 (I've been ignoring it as it only shows up in debug mode, and then only on Internet Explorer) but I've not yet tested it in IE

• The help pages are probably the same problem as the frames. Basically anything that isn't a full size web page is going to look silly with a giant header. Shouldn't be too hard to fix just some special case rules in the CSS. I'll probably just hide the header for the frames, and perhaps create a mini-header for the help. (Though to be honest I'll probably also file bugs asking for many of the uses of frames to be done away with as soon as possible too. Frames rub me the wrong way for all sorts of reasons.)

• I take it you've spotted the 'logged in as' link in the footer? There is a bit of a dearth of options when it comes to what you can include in the headers and footers without hacking around in the PHP guts of Moodle. My standard, but slightly unsatisfying, CSS hack is to display: none things I don't want to see and this seems to work if you place the echo $menu within appropriately targettable container (e.g. div class="hidden"). You could even specify it so that the language menu and the login info appear but not the jump menu or any other combination. It would be nice to be able to specify the exact location of language and login info separately though. (A devious part of my brain is thinking that you could echo $menu twice with appropriate classes and hide the parts separately but that's definitely getting further into ugly hack territory, especially as display: none doesn't always apply to certain accessibility tools).

• note that the display: none hack, which I also used for the menu icons, doesn't actually stop the images etc. being downloaded, it just stops them being displayed. So for performance and clarity your commenting out solution is actually better though it is more work, and it's what I'm working towards generally rather than constantly downloading and then hiding things with CSS.

• I can't really explain why the Chat isn't working, I've perhaps broken something important in the header? The right frame comes up blank for me in Safari but I'll look into it.

• I don't really use SCORM much. Do I need a SCORM (learning object?) in order to test it? Where would I get one?

• I've not tested on dialup yet. There's also various web page optimising tools that will measure download size in a more objective manner and give and idea for comparison, though I've not used those either. I'm guessing the theme is fairly lightweight by Moodle theme standards. There aren't that many images and the original Kubrick theme images are actually very well compressed by the original author. Some are smaller than the enrolment key icon for example. Also the fact that they are mostly background images should mean they can load in the background (appropriately enough) without delaying layout of the page. The other images aren't as small (though by no means large) but I'll see what I can do to compress them further once they are finalised. The theme should work without images too for anyone who likes there themes to be really minimalist.

A third sneak peek.

improvements in this version

• new tabs
• even less outlined boxes and horizontal rules
• stripey logs
• the return of the grey side column
• a few Internet Explorer fixes (still far from pixel perfect)

upcoming

• fixing pages with frames
• calendar CSS
• trawling through the less common modules and patching them up (where necessary)
• better commenting in the CSS so people can see what's going on and steal individual features of the theme
• rewriting the manifesto (see first post)
• recruiting help to find bugs in the more obscure corners of Moodle on various platforms
• writing up/fixing all the various bugs/issues I tripped over in the process of creating this
• 3 column version

The grey right-column was an original feature of Kubrick that I didn't think could be done with Moodle for various subtle reasons but I managed to figure out a slightly wacky CSS hack to make it work. This will almost certainly cause problems somewhere but it works on the versions of Firefox, Safari and Opera that I've tested so I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Comments and descriptions of problems are welcome (with screenshots and browser/OS details if possible, thanks!).

Is the text "MyMoodle" a logotype (i.e. an image) or is it just the text in a standard web font?

If so then just use an <h1> tag with the 'shapes' set as a background-image (this is just a slight variation on the technique used by most themes to change the header backgrounds on the sideblocks)

If you need an actual image of the MyMoodle text then limitations in Internet Explorer mean the image of the text would need to be a GIF with a transparent background and therefore, unless the difference in shade between the text and the background was quite subtle, you'd end up with quite a blocky effect.

The question in my mind is why you don't just create a single image? Does the text need to change dynamically?

I would recommend you look into something called sIFR.

It allows you to use any font you like, and creates a small flash movie of exactly the right size to replace the text you specify with a certain class.

It's an ideal tool for adding typographical richness to headlines without sacrificing broad compatability, accessability or giving yourself a great deal of work.

I've been meaning to integrate this into Moodle for a while, but Flash isn't really my thing. It may take a bit of savvy to get it to work, but I know there's a few flash-heads around here and I'd say it's much less of a dead-end than embedding fonts.