Posts made by Patrick Malley

This gets asked a lot, so I'll try my best to explain things.

If you are creating your own custom theme from scratch:

Duplicate the Standard theme, rename it, clear out all of the stylesheets except for ie6.css and ie7.css, and add a new blank stylesheet called styles.css.

Open config.php and edit line 9 to look like this:

$THEME->sheets = array('styles');

Your theme will load all of the Standard files before loading its own. All styles you add to styles.css will change the Standard theme to suit your needs.

This is the method I use (more or less) to create all of my themes. It is the best option if you want to make several changes, but want to maximize compatibility with future Moodle upgrades.

If you like another theme, let's say "Wood", but you want to make some minor changes to that theme, follow all of the steps above, and:

Change line 16 of config.php to the following:

$THEME->standardsheets = false;

and change line 31 to:

$THEME->parent = 'wood';

What you're essentially doing here is saying "No, don't include the Standard stylesheets because I'm using Wood as a parent theme, which calls up the standardsheets itself."

The only reason you would do this instead of editing the Wood theme directly is to save the changes you've made during future upgrades.