Patrick Malley

First of all, I would listen to Joseph and Urs. 

I merged all three files together (layout, font, color) for my fixed-width theme.  I went one step further (as did Joseph with Orangechoc) and eliminated using the standard theme.  I hacked Moodle quite a bit in this theme and didn't want massive cascades or load times.  For example, I didn't want to load my tab img files over the standard tab img files. 

In reality, however, I'm not sure my efforts paid off.  I still have a big, fat, complicated theme!

Basically, here's what you need to ask yourself:

1. Will you be the person doing all editing and upgrading in the future?  I ask because, if not, you may want to stick with Urs's suggestion and not stray from the Moodle css format.  The difference between your theme and the standard theme could confuse a third party (as in the case with trying to modify Joseph's Orangechoc).
2. How modified will your theme be?  If the answer is 'not that modified,' then I wouldn't mess with the structure for practical reasons - like time.
3. Do you plan to share your theme with the community?  If so, you may want to keep the structure that we're all familiar with.
   

 So, I give you a complicated answer to your question and refuse to pick from your list.  It's simply up to you and your particular situation.  Good luck.

Thank you, Jeff!

I thought you were a magician. This makes sense.

I linked to Classroom Revolution's test site this morning from an earlier thread on this site.  I logged in and was somewhat curious by how fast Moodle loaded from their server.  So, I did a speed test on that site using websiteoptimization.com.  That test revealed that Classroom Revolution's test site was only loading 215 bytes of HTML.  That was it.  Now, I  am new to theme development and I understand a thing or two about cache and CSS and what-not, but I can't understand how their site is so light.

When I do the exact same test on a course page on my site, here are my statistics:

Object type	Size (bytes)
HTML:	7818
HTML Images:	434
CSS Images:	31620
Total Images:	32054
Javascript:	41248
CSS:	44015
Multimedia:	0
Other:	0

I get the same type of high numbers when speed testing moodle.org!  I understand that my site uses more images and should be heavier than Classroom Revolution's test site, but why doesn't my site cache the same way as theirs?

How can I get similar results on my site?  What combination of server configuration and coding do I need to lighten the load of my page to anything near 215 bytes!???

Here is what I used to disable the images and the column from appearing all together.

#left-column .sideblock li .icon img,
#left-column .sideblock .list .c0 {
  display:none;
}

You may want to try:

.block_course_list .sideblock li icon .c0,
.block_site_main .sideblock li icon .c0 {
  display:none;
}

I think what you are doing is only reducing the width of one instance of the block you want to change.

I updated to Beta 5 and the appearance problem has been resolved for my theme.