02 March 2009, 17:45

Hi. Been using Moodle for some time and am able to make themes, etc.  New to mahara, and I want to try the Mahoodle, but have a question about themes.  First, I can't seem to find documentation on how to make a mahara theme. Second, is there a recommended approach to making themes match between the two systems.  

 I have added horizontal menus to my moodle site, and I see the use of similar ones in mahara. Is the menuing easy to modify also?

Thanks,

Jamie

02 March 2009, 18:56

Hi - there's no documentation about themes, which is something I really want to fix! See my post (the second reply) in this thread for a brief overview.

Mahara uses smarty, so if you know how that works, modifying the menus should be simple enough.

02 March 2009, 20:21

Hi Nigel. Thanks for the link. I have a tendency to go crazy with figuring things out, so I look forward to working on the theme. I will try to keep any relevant notes on what works for me, which I will contribute from a mahara beginners viewpoint :-)

Another question popped into my head - I need to have a ste of forums for dozens of categories on my site. I have been building my site with moodle and decided to stick with moodle's forums, to minimize having to integrate an external forum into the mix.. My moodle forums are all consolidated into one moodle course, just like they have on moodle.org... but now with mahara now available to me.......mmmmm.... should I use the forums from mahara or moodle?  To tell you teh truth, on first blush, I like the way the forums look and feel on mahara better. Do you have any thoughts?

02 March 2009, 21:18

Well we designed the forums initially to behave in a quite similar manner to Moodle's forums. For example, they handle the rules around when you're allowed to edit a post in the same way. Our forums are threaded only though right now (probably wouldn't be hard to add a way to make them flat).

There's a few visual tweaks we'd like to make to them too, though overall I think our forums look a bit nicer than Moodle's out of the box.

Still, Moodle's forums have been around longer and so have a few more features. It depends if you want them though.

And also, if you wan to create lots and lots of forums, you might be able to break that up a bit in Mahara using Mahara's groups.. just a though

03 March 2009, 3:46

Hi Jamie,

greetings frmo germany ;-)

If you are interested in theme design, feel free to join the Mahara theme group http://mahara.org/group/view.php?id=40  You will find a free theme in the File area.

cheers Heinz

03 March 2009, 10:38

Hi Nigel and Heinz,

 Nigel, I like the idea of the different groups.  It just seems smoother than the way the forums are in a course in Moodle. 

 Greetings to you Heinz from sunny Florida (although it was a surprising 37F this am when I came to work). I joined your group and will start looking at that theme as an example.  BTW the link you provided has an extra <space> character after the id=40 , which results in an error page.

  Thanks!

Jamie

03 March 2009, 11:17

Hi Jamie,

greetings from the cold black forest ( 0° C)

upps copy and paste does not seem to work all times. I hope you managed to find the group anway ;-)

The theme is an adaption  of the excellent Anomaly theme from Patrick (http://newschoollearning.com) My theme still needs some tidying. Wolud be great if you help to improve it. Please post all related stuff in the thmee group.

cheers Heinz