David Scotson

While Timothy's approach should work in theory and not be too difficult technically, there are issues with providing different stylesheets to different users. I ran across these while experimenting with user selectable color schemes.

The main problem is that not all of the 'style' of a Moodle site is contained in the CSS stylesheets. Some of the text and background colours are defined in the HTML using colors specified in config.php.

The second, slightly more philosophical problem, is that a teacher seeing a very different view from what the student sees could lead to problems e.g. using a text color that doesn't show up well against the student background color.

I tried to do that in CSS (as part of implementing a user-selectable text size changer) but found that text sizes were often hard-coded into the HTML and so the text size only changed in a few areas.

Did I miss something obvious?

"If one does not enter the name of the quiz item then not only is one prompted for reentry but one also gets all the text erased."

That sounds like a bug. Is it a known one?

With the enrolment key (one-time password to enter a course) you can either enroll everyone manually and keep the key secret *or* send them the enrolment key in an email. Both work well in different situations.

It the second case, once everyone is enrolled you can change the key to something unguessable. People who have already logged in won't be asked to enter it again and if you send the new key out to a different batch of users you can simply change it again.

I notice that some Activities, Glossaries for example, reuse their given titles when they are displayed. Others, Resources to give one example, do not and only feature the title in the breadcrumb navigation.

I find myself wanting to repeat this information as a heading within my resources. This presents me with two problems.

• It breaks the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself), one of the key pieces of advice proposed by the authors of my favourite computing book, The Pragmatic Programmer, which therefore makes this duplication appear inelegant and error prone to my programmer's mind.

• Resource autolinking is unaware that the title has special significance and so links it to itself as if it were any ordinary text.

Was this a positive design decision or did the inconsistency between Activities simply occur as development advanced?

Is there any occasion when displaying the title prominantly at the top of an Activity/Resource would be considered inappropriate? (other than for people who, like me, have already manually duplicated the title).