20 March 2012, 14:24

Hello,

I would put the enabling / disabling of skins on the institution level to be more flexible. Institutions can choose themes and thus they should also be able to decide whether their users can override them or not.

For example, even if you take a small Mahara instance with just two institutions: Primary children and secondary students: For the former the school might want to decide to have a consistent theme but for the latter allow them to make their own skins.

Cheers

Kristina

29 March 2012, 12:00

I didn't realise there were page themes AND skins AND site themes.

Wow, it's getting a bit complicated!

I agree with Richard in that case that it would be good to simplify things. Can I suggest having two types of theme:

• Site Theme
• Page Theme

...and removing the term 'skins' completely.

So Gregor's skins would in that case become Page Themes. I find it confusing having skins and themes. There is nothing in those names which explains what the difference is between them.

In my own scenario, I would like to have a fixed Site Theme, that users can't edit, but allow users to apply Page Themes to their pages. In that case, they only need to see a list of available Page Themes when editing their pages. Any more information than that is potentially confusing.

Gregor, I like the visual preview when selecting themes, it's very user-friendly.

(One thought I had is that it would be nice to introduce a 'border' type selection graphic in Mahara, for radio button form elements. Radio buttons are a bit old-fashioned looking nowadays - it would be nice to highlight a selection with a clear border/background div graphic. That could work well in this case. I suppose that can be done at a Site Theme level though.)