Spice up your Moodle 2 frontpage by displaying category names as buttons with Alicia Wallace's Renderer

The course categories are nicely laid out as
buttons with text and images.
very nice!

Alicia Wallace of the United Kingdom has created something that changes the look and feel of the frontpage. Her creation is a renderer file with a custom CSS file for Moodle 2. It is based on the Sky High standard theme for Moodle 2.x. The image above shows the renderer in action on the frontpage of Hartpury College's Moodle site.

Wood theme revisited with Julian Ridden's Wood theme for Moodle 2.x

Oak Tree in Ontario August 2011
Source: commons.wikimedia.org

"A Bootstrap based theme for Moodle 2 recreating the classic 1.9 Wood theme with a modern twist" Source: https://github.com/moodleman/moodle-theme_wood

I was recently intrigued by this Twitter post. 

I think it was because the image of Julian Ridden's Moodle 2 Wood theme reminded me of my old wooden chessboard, no hang on, .... or was it my bookshelf(?)...

My review of the Ergo theme for Moodle 2.5. It's the best theme I have purchased so far!

I think, ERGO I am!

 

Ronin's Thinker meets the iPad.
Hmmm....

Actually, it's the first theme I've bought so far. Ergo is a Latin word meaning "therefore", "hence" or "consequently". So you could say, "I think, ergo (therefore) I am". It's also the best-selling Moodle 2.5 theme by the husband-and-wife team of Tom Riley and Xiaoying Riley who make up 3rd Wave Media.

Xiaoying is bilingual (speaks English and Mandarin) and Tom's trying hard to get the correct Mandarin intonation. I know how hard it is. I once asked in Cantonese, a storekeeper for a shirt that had lots of holes in it. He smiled widely and pointed to a shirt that had dragon motives in it.

Back to 3rd Wave Media. They specialise in Web Design, with skills spanning all areas of multimedia including audio and video production. Both Tom and Xiaoying have their respective websites where they showcase their work portfolio. You can browse through their galleries. Ah, it makes me wish that I had taken up graphic arts or specialised in Web development when I was in college.

Purpose of this Blog Post
Firstly I will show you what I like about the Ergo theme. I purchased my my own license of the theme and I am not connected in any way to 3rd Wave media. Secondly, I will share with you how I modified the Ergo theme to produce two variants.

How I created a rotating image slider for the Educator theme on my coursepage

I successfully created a rotating slider for my Moodle 2.5 site based on the excellent post by Gerrard Shaw on his blog: http://gshaw0.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/how-to-add-an-image-rotator-in-moodle-2-2/.

Moodle 1.9 Custom Corners Theme for mobile devices by Yedidia Klein

Here's a quick question. How many Moodle 1.9.x themes do you know of that are specially designed for mobile devices? Forgive my ignorance, but I only know of one - Isreali Yedidia Klein's theme named "custom_corners_mobile". You can read about it here.

It is a modified JQuery version of the "custom_corners" theme for Moodle 1.9. You can download Yedidia's theme from here. After you have downloaded, extracted and ftp'ed the theme to your Moodle site, you can then add these lines to your config.php:

//Mobile Detection and theming
include("theme/custom_corners_mobile/mobile_functions.php");
if (ismobile())
  $CFG->theme="custom_corners_mobile";

After this, you can then browse your Moodle site via your mobile device.

Do you know of any other themes for Moodle 1.9 that cater for mobile devices? Please share in the comments section below.

Happy Moodling
Frankie Kam