David Scotson

I'm building these on an alpha release of 1.4, I guess something may have changed before release. I'll look into it, as you shouldn't have to alter the HTML to get these to work.

What exactly does/doesn't it do?

edit: I quickly switched the themes on one of our working Moodles that's running 1.4 and, at a glance, it seems okay.

My fuzzybox theme (which was named for now defunct historical reasons) shows a slight variation on colorbox. As well as the merely cosmetic change of using a darker background, it also shows letter spacing and centered text, which while it sounds simple actually needs some non-obvious CSS trickery in this case.

Screenshot

The interesting CSS is as follows:

.sideblockheading div {
    width: 100%;
    text-align: center;
    letter-spacing: .2em;
    font-size: 12px;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    padding-top: 8px;
    padding-bottom: 3px;
}

You have to target the div and set it's width to 100% or else the text-align will have no effect as these two shots demonstrate. Both have the text centered, and the div outlined in red.

before

and

after

Another thing to notice is the padding that has been added to the top and bottom of the div with the title in it. This is a nice example of making something stand out, not by making it bigger or brighter but by clearing some space around it.

My next theme is called colorbox and it simply colors an entire block with a single base color.

As you can see from the screenshot I've chosen to work in shades of gray, simply because it is less to think about at the moment. To translate it into a standard monochrome color-scheme, like you see on Moodle.org, you can simply transpose the white-gray-black color range into pale yellow-orange-brown or whatever colors you wish to use.

The tricky part of this style is the following lines (found at the bottom of style.css):

.sideblock thead,
.sideblock tbody,
.sideblock tr,
.sideblock th,
.sideblock td,
.sideblockmain,
.sideblockmain table,
.sideblocklinks {
    background-color: transparent;
}

.sideblock {
    background: #eee;
 }

This ensures that the color of the base isn't overlapped by the background color of tables and table cells layered on top of it. In this case, it is actually unnecessary, except for the added clarity it gives, since you could just set all the areas to the same shade. However if you were to apply a gradient or patterned background image then transparency would be essential to allow it to show through properly.

The theme also demonstrates a different approach to titles, as rather than being boxed off from the section it titles, the title text is indicated merely by its size and position relative to rest of the block. If you make titles large enough (and you may even consider shortening the titles in the language pack to allow for bigger text e.g. administration -> admin), then fairly low contrast colors will suffice and using`text-transform' to make them all lowercase can give a fairly modern look:

.sideblockheading {
    font-size: 20px;
    color: #aaa;
    background-color: transparent;
    text-transform: lowercase;
}

If you want it to, yes, but you have to set an admin configuration option called opentogoogle and this defaults to no.

My Google block checks this variable, and if your site is closed to Google, it only allow you to search the web, since Google won't have any of your Moodle site indexed. But if Google is allowed access to your site, it gives you the option to search either your local domain or the web.

I agree that title case should be used rather than capitalising every first letter. However, I believe we are only talking about the small number of block titles, and by their nature they are unlikely to stretch beyond two words. In English title case always capitalises the first and last word so we should therefore be okay around 99% of the time.

In the few cases were something does need a lowercase first letter pedants like you or I can simply ask for a correction to "Spotlight on Moodle" or "Search the Web" etc.