22 August 2009, 1:17

Hi,

A selector for users to set what theme they see is something we should do too. I might give it a go, though it will definitely be disable-able on a site and institution level I think, as some institutions may want to force themes to be branded their way.

I think you are partially seeing a deeper problem that we have with the usability of View creation at the moment. We've come to the conclusion that having all three of those screens is very likely too many. We've been thinking about several ways to cut down on the number of screens, and improve those remaining - well to be fair, Ray Merrill has been, while we've (as always) been thrilled with his suggestions . After 1.2 we plan to do another round of usability work, any plans for improving the editor will be floated to the community for their opinion of course  

22 August 2009, 13:51

Hi Nigel,

"though it will definitely be disable-able on a site and institution level I think, as some institutions may want to force themes to be branded their way"
Definitely. That will make it very flexible for institutional use as well as non-institutional hosts.

"We've been thinking about several ways to cut down on the number of screens"
Having two ("Edit Properties" which includes metadata and access + "Edit View") instead of three may be a step into that direction.

I'm looking forward to the usability changes you are implementing.

Kristina

24 February 2010, 15:30

The ability to change the theme for a specific view is a great feature. The demo site looks great. Is this feature on hold for 1.3? Is there any way I can hack a 1.23 site to have this feature?

Thanks from a Mahara newbie.

29 March 2010, 7:45

I am just setting up an evaluation of Mahara with a group of students and after demoing it to the lecturer the first thing that she asked was how do the students choose a style. 

The lecturer felt that the way to engage the students was to allow them to pick the appearance and that this was more important than the students having control over content or access to views. The lecturer felt that for students, selecting the appearance made them feel that they had "ownership" more so than the view  containing items that they had created. The lack of changing themes meant that the students had to conform to the corporate standard.

To a certain degree I can see her point as I have witnessed many students on MySpace or various other social sites spending hours on the appearance without there being any discernable content.

If there was a way of patching this into the current version of Mahara I would quite happily beta test it.

29 March 2010, 17:15

Hi Matthew,

Currently your only easy options are to install from the master branch (http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/archive-tarball/master), or to test it on our dev site http://master.dev.mahara.org. That's because it's a bit of a hassle to pick out all the commits related to view themes and apply them to 1.2.

The upside of using master is that you'll get some other new stuff too, like atom feeds for blogs, profile icons fetched from gravatar.com, a recent forum posts block, real name searching, automatic disabling of user email addresses after lots of bounces, and other stuff I've forgotten about. We've got a lot of other new features nearly ready to go in too.

R.

29 March 2010, 19:34

Hi Matthew,

Just to clarify about those demo sites: we have a few, and most are not very up to date.

demo.mahara.org is usually the most recent stable release.

dev.mahara.org is supposed to be the latest unstable release, but we haven't been doing releases on the unstable (master) branch since 1.2, so I suspect that site is now older than demo.mahara.org!  We should probably close it down until we do another unstable release.

master.dev.mahara.org is not fully up to date, but it's usually pretty close.

The theming for views feature is a little strange and we may still change it a bit before 1.3.  You need to turn it on as Administrator in the Site Options area, and if you do, I recommend turning the 'small view headers' setting on too.  That's because if you have the full header with all the navigation, and you change pages to a view with a different theme, it can be quite jarring seeing the navigation jump around to reflect the new theme (at least that's the case with the standard Mahara themes -- if you only use your own custom themes that all have similar page headers then it may not be a problem).

R.

12 July 2011, 9:03

master.dev.mahara.org i'm using this site