Themes: Aardvark
The Aardvark project started in 2008 after a focus group with students led the development of our somewhat basic and neglected installation of Moodle into a (at the time) modern and engaging platform. The idea was to drive student use by creating a colourful, MySpace-inspired, student intranet as the front-end, with the functionality of a VLE behind it. Pressure from those students would then ultimately drive adoption by tutors.
Over the years, Aardvark has been an exciting and arguably inspiring project, started at Newbury College, but benefiting from the contributions and expertise of many other developers. It was the first open-source Moodle theme to include a drop-down navigation menu, a concept that would eventually become a core element of Moodle theme engine, and at its peak was installed on over 5,000 Moodle installations around the world.
Development
of Aardvark slowed down a few years ago as many of its advantages were
adopted as features in the core theme engine of Moodle and a lack of
development time meant that I was no longer able to keep up with the
changes required to make the theme compatible with the latest releases.
Unfortunately I have had to make the decision to cease development of
Aardvark to focus on other commitments.
Aardvark has been an incredible project to work on, and I have learnt a huge amount about PHP and CSS along the way and I would like to thank everyone who has contacted me over the years with their kind comments. Special thanks to Mary L Evans, Patrick Malley and all of the other contributors and supporters who have been part of this journey.
Useful links
Screenshots
I like this theme very much - it is very 'live' and good for the eyes! Very good work...
I'm possibly one of those few who check it with RTL language (Hebrew) and spotted some problems when using IE (11, maybe others)...
Where can I fill a bug report?
Thanks.
From the instagram block you have on the web demo
One of my school adopted this theme. We upgraded to 3.6 and all courses with Aardvark theme can not access messaging. Do you plan on releasing an update?
The Aardvark project started in 2008 after a focus group with students led the development of our somewhat basic and neglected installation of Moodle into a (at the time) modern and engaging platform. The idea was to drive student use by creating a colourful, MySpace-inspired, student intranet as the front-end, with the functionality of a VLE behind it. Pressure from those students would then ultimately drive adoption by tutors.
Over the years, Aardvark has been an exciting and arguably inspiring project, started at Newbury College, but benefiting from the contributions and expertise of many other developers. It was the first open-source Moodle theme to include a drop-down navigation menu, a concept that would eventually become a core element of Moodle theme engine, and at its peak was installed on over 5,000 Moodle installations around the world.
Development of Aardvark slowed down a few years ago as many of its advantages were adopted as features in the core theme engine of Moodle and a lack of development time meant that I was no longer able to keep up with the changes required to make the theme compatible with the latest releases.
Aardvark has been an incredible project to work on, and I have learnt a huge amount about PHP and CSS along the way and I would like to thank everyone who has contacted me over the years with their kind comments. Special thanks to Mary L Evans, Patrick Malley and all of the other contributors and supporters who have been part of this journey.