Patrick Malley

There's a lot to go through. Please don't mind my list of thoughts.

1.) Disabling old themes from selection in 2.0 is a great idea. I'm all for breaking old themes if it brings greater flexibility and speed to the software. With that said, succinct documentation needs to be provided to help people upgrade their old themes.

2.) I'm not sure I understand the discussion about YUI CSS being optional. Will Standard use this CSS framework? Would all themes using Standard as a parent not also then use the framework? If Standard uses the CSS framework, would a new theme that uses Standard as a parent need its own set of layout templates to remove the YUI CSS grid classes?

I guess I just need a little more information on how the YUI CSS framework would be optional.

I'd also like to hear Petr's and Urs's feedback on using the lighter, more semantic Boilerplate CSS framework instead.

3.) I plan to develop multiple themes with different color variants. Settings.php gets my big +1.

4.) Can you explain the difference between the "layout templates" in layout/ and the "templates" that will go into template/

5.) Theme caching - great. Theme designer mode - also great.

6.) Meta.php - I have to agree with Urs: I'd rather break validation in an IE specific stylesheet. My +1 to keep this in one form or another.

If we were to go with a browser-specific body class, that's great. I'd probably still place all IE specific styles in an IE-specific stylesheet and call to them manually in the theme's template files.

7.) Themes in dataroot - I think this would be fine as an option in settings.php. Furthermore, I think it would be great if the CSS files could be accessed and edited directly through the Moodle interface (much like the language files are now). Any changes to the CSS through the web interface will be saved to the dataroot. The admin for the site can set permissions for who gets to see and edit these sheets which can be stored in dataroot at the course level also.

8.) Few themes in the official distribution: I've been asked to create 20 new themes to be shipped with 2.0. I can certainly see the appeal of cutting this down to, say, 3 themes as you've suggested, as long as their is a web interface to preview and download themes inside Moodle.

However, the database providing the themes seen through this interface should not be the one located at http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6552. A separate database containing only regularly updated, officially supported themes should be used instead.

Have you guys had a look at the boilerplate CSS framework? it's a " stripped down framework which provides the bare essentials to begin any project." It includes all of the resets and typographical niceties without any of the non-semantic naming conventions. Might be worth a look.

That makes sense for guys like you and me, who aren't afraid to dive into a config file to change stuff around. But, my experience supporting multi-variant themes has led me to believe that some users will never be comfortable editing these files, even when the documentation is very clear and straight-forward.

For the layman, changing the names of two files is simpler because it's something they've done before.

If you find editing the config.php file to be easier, then (as I do) feel free to switch between variants that way.

Thank you for your feedback, Jospeph.

1.) While I'm getting a bit sick of rounded corners myself, people do seem to like them.

2.) Georgia is the default font for this theme:

body, p, th, td, li,
.sideblock .content {
font-family:Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif;
font-size:0.95em;
line-height:1.4;
}

3.) I've tried to only pick background colors that show both black and white text quite well. I'll have a look at these again.

4.) At the end of the day, we're talking about 117px of header space (counting the navbar). Unfortunately, I think reducing the 25px of margin at the top would negatively impact the display of the page.

5.) I have seen the calendar issue and will find a fix on my next update.

6.) The color does not change in the footer either with my newest update. However, there should be an underline when hovered.

I must have missed this post while away. Sorry about the trouble and thank you for the testing.

For some reason I put off adding the color variant stylesheets until now. The Anomaly download now includes four variants: blue, green, purple, and orange.