20 December 2012, 0:05

Hi,

I've downloaded a couple of themes to test in our new Mahara 1.6 site. The themes are available from the selector but only partially load. I got the error "ERROR - something bad happened after headers have been sent. Check the error log for more information." when I tried to switch the site theme - and was left with a header and no menu (had to delete the theme to get back to default). Picking the themes at page level displays about 80% of what I expected to see.

I looked at my error log but have to say it didn't tell me very much - here's a short excerpt:

[27-Oct-2012 21:25:20 UTC]   * ActivityType->notify_users() at /var/www/html/mahara/lib/activity.php:82
[27-Oct-2012 21:25:20 UTC]   * handle_activity(object(stdClass), object(stdClass)) at /var/www/html/mahara/lib/activity.php:50
[27-Oct-2012 21:25:20 UTC]   * activity_occurred("maharamessage", object(stdClass)) at /var/www/html/mahara/lib/activity.php:478
[27-Oct-2012 21:25:20 UTC]   * ActivityType->notify_user(object(stdClass)) at /var/www/html/mahara/lib/activity.php:493

Can anyone guide me on what has changed between version 1.5 and 1.6 - and what I need to modify in the themes to get them to work?

Regards, Gordon.

23 March 2013, 1:24

Hi Gordon

I'm setting up a Moodle/Mahara site just now for training, can you recommend any theme that I could use for this, Moodle 2.4 and Mahara 1.6, if anything?

25 March 2013, 21:51

Hi Jas,

In the end I modified an existing theme that had been built for Mahara 1.6. At some point I'll start testing with a 1.4 theme to upgrade it, as I'm keen to have a wide range of different colour template themes. There are quite a few changes to the structure between 1.4 and 1.6 versions and I haven't had time to test and document the modifications needed.

One of my to-do list jobs this week is to submit the customised theme to the wiki. It's based on the contributed theme Ambrose, and is a fluid width theme intended to be more accessible to dyslexic users. I'm also in the process of submitting Moodle themes for approval as plugins - a set of 10 'planet' themes (earth, mars, etc) -  2 column (my prefered layout) offering a range of coloured backgrounds.

I'd recommend using a different default theme colour for your test site - keep the same basic layout as the live site so that menus etc are in the same place - but at a glance you can tell you aren't in the live site. Having extra themes that you can switch to during training is great for showing people that the look of the site doesn't have to stop with the vanilla version.

Regards, Gordon.