David Scotson

A few people have been asking recently about customising Moodle. In particular people are asking for 'extreme customisation' or for Moodle theme's that don't look like Moodle. Now, I don't think anyone has actually said it can't be done, but enough people have said they haven't seen such a beast to make it seem like it can't.

Ignoring for a moment the strangeness of aiming to change a functional piece of software beyond recognition and the user-interface and usability issues that raises, I think that there is a lot that can be done within the current Moodle Theme infrastructure, but potential themers are perhaps lacking two things:

• pointers on some semi-advanced HTML/CSS styling techniques
• inspiration

I've been digging into the possibilities for themeing Moodle and thought I'd share what I've found in the hope of providing something in the way of the two needs above. Hopefully others wil be encouraged to share info on their own tips and modifications from the point of view of sharing knowledge and experience rather than simply finished products for others to use.

So here is my first "theme" (attached), called bleach, which was heavily inspired by Doug Bowman's Introducing Bleached post, which acts as a prelude to his new blog redesign.

It is, as you can see from the screenshot, not really a theme at all, more a mind clearing excersise. It is simply almost everything but the text turned white, which seems as good a place as any to start as any when trying to design Moodle Themes that are examples of "thinking outside the box"

If you do try out this theme, note how surprisingly usable it is. Just the bold headings, the repetition, visual alignment and the whitespace between blocks is enough to give subtle clues about what belongs together and what is separate.

I'd keep the code tags and convert tt to code too, particularly if this tag stripping code isn't just restricted to the Wiki Module. But I think tt is allowed even in XHTML 1.0 strict:

http://liorean.web-graphics.com/xhtml/comparison.loose-strict.html

Do you know why the emails are rejected?

If you can figure it out (there may be clues in your bounce messages or you could even just ask someone at hanmail.net) then perhaps that problem may be more common and therefore the hypothetical bug would be a higher priority.

You could also try simply asking hanmail.net to stop bouncing your mail.

I didn't notice this question last week but the Google search uses code straight from the Google mothership. You can use it without paying for anything. There is a Terms of Service document, but I believe that only applies if you use the more advanced forms and customise the search results page and/or try to gain ad revenue from the ads displayed alongside the results.

There's lots more info (including links to the Google pages about this) in the thread where I originally posted my code though you may prefer to get the code straight from Moodle's CVS where I assume Martin's version is available.

I think you've got a couple of minor problems in your code here:

<input name="hl" type="hidden" id="hl" value=\"th\">

The extra slashes around the th prevent Google showing it's Thai interface. There are similar extra slashes in the lines specifying encoding:

<input name="ie" type="hidden" id="ie5" value=\"windows-874\">
<input name="oe" type="hidden" id="oe2" value=\"windows-874\">

Also, Google can't search in areas smaller than a domain so each mention of "http://www.bangkaew.com/elearning" should really be ".bangkeaw.com" or elearning.bangkeaw.com"