David Scotson

Just a guess but...

Sometimes IE8/9/10 will act like IE7, especially on intranet sites. This is called "compatability view". You might be triggering this mode by mistake somehow, either with server settings, browser settings or content of the Moodle page.

I think if you hit F12 the browser will tell what mode you're in, e.g. a copy of IE8 I have says "Browser Mode: IE8 Document Mode: IE8 Standards".

It's also worth noting that when Moodle says it doesn't support IE8 for 2.6, they don't mean what I personally would mean if I said "no IE8 support". I think they've ended up in a worst of both worlds situation where they're doing the work for supporting IE8 but scaring people off by saying they're not supporting it. They're still adding code within the last few months to support IE6 for example.

edit: I had a look at the code that outputs the error message you see:

https://github.com/moodleman/moodle-theme_essential/blob/master/layout/includes/header.php#L49-L60

It's not doing anything particularly complicated, just checking to see if your user agent contains the string "MSIE 7", so this points the finger pretty directly at compatibility view.

I'm not sure you're going to be able to change human nature on this one, so you might want to just reframe it, e.g.

"Yes, that's because it's so popular" (at this point it would be ideal to be able to insert some impressive stat about number of people using Essential, maybe downloads or something?), "with that amount of usage you're always going to have a small percentage of people who install the wrong version or forget to clear their caches after installation".

This also, handily serves as a "social proof", which should encourage people who are nervous that they're following the herd and not striking out on their own.

Having another theme making use of renderers, but doing it's own thing visually, should be good for making sure the renderers have a good API and hopefully then encourage others to do their own thing in a virtuous cycle.

You might want to think about going straight to Bootstrap 3 though, it'll be a better base for a stripped down theme.

I don't know if that's going to help someone jumping all the way from 1.9 to 2.6. Possibly the 1.9 -> 2.6 changes are as big as the changes from Standard to Clean.

Some useful questions might be:

Have you built any other Moodle 2.X themes, or just Moodle 1.X?

Are you familiar with Bootstrap?

What level of customisation are you aiming for? Just adding a logo and changing a few colors, or trying to match an existing look?

There's quite a lot of info in the Wiki, but it's not always well organised.

It's hard to know where to start without more info but, for example, are you aware that most small customisations can be done simply by pasting the CSS into the theme settings?

Creating a theme without any parent themes is usually a bad idea.

Did you copy the base theme? If not there's probably stuff in there that you need for this, and a bunch of other things. Which you can copy in or inherit from base.