David Scotson

I just read that Microsoft intends to include SPDY in IE11, which since it's already supported in Firefox and Chrome makes it likely to be the standard. I was wondering if using SPDY was already considered a best practice for speeding up Moodle but the only reference I find in the forum is to an obscure bug that someone encountered when they accidentally turned it on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY

http://www.chromium.org/spdy

If it works it should make Moodle faster with little extra work, especially for those geographically distant from the servers and on high-latency mobile networks, similar to the change you see when you turn on gzip though probably not as big a leap, some numbers I've seen are 1.3x faster on mobile and 1.5x faster on desktop.

I was wondering if anyone had tested this and had some ballpark numbers from Google Analytics or similar to show what kind of improvement this made for Moodle specifically.

I can't really think of any other single change that isn't already a best practice (e.g. gzip, image compression, caching) that would come close to having that kind of impact on Moodle's speed so this seems well worth investigating.

I built a prototype that was the same as the first drupal link. It's relatively easy to do as Moodle Themes have a CSS pre-processor function that basically lets you do anything you want to the CSS, up to and including throwing it away and inserting the compiled output of some less files. However, it relied on the same PHP version of LESS that they use, and it had a few incompatabilities with the main implementation of LESS (which is written in javascript) and the project development seems to have slowed so it didn't seem wise to continue down that path.

The Live CSS module is interesting though. It runs the javascript less compiler in the admin user's browser in order to make changes and then saves the output CSS to the server. I'd intended to see if this was possible with Moodle but hadn't got around to it, having a look at what people are doing with Drupal will help with that. It's probably wacky enough that it would never be the preferred solution for Moodle core, but it could help create some very interesting alternative themes, with some very advanced customisation possible via a simple page in the browser.

I think setting #region-pre to 80% width might be the problem here.

On my test server Clean doesn't look like that (I assume we're talking about the white margin being bigger on the left of the content than the right). The size of the course titles and the layout of the course description text differ too. What (exact) version of Moodle are you taking that screenshot on?

I've been looking at ways to make it easier for users to make use of the Bootstrap CSS to jazz up the content they add to Moodle. One surprisingly effective way is to cut and paste from a web page into the TinyMCE editor.

So you can visit the Bootstrap examples (or a cut down version you build for your users) and simply find the visual look they are wanting, then cut'n'paste it.

Here's an example screenshot featuring table markup, labels, and preformatted code. I simply copied and pasted from here:

http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/components.html#labels-badges

Once it is pasted in the Moodle TinyMCE editor, you will see the final formatting live, and can edit the content with relative ease.

edit: to be clear, I'm not cutting and pasting the underlying HTML, that is all done for me. Hmm, this is tricky to describe, probably best to just give it a go.