With 2.5 now release I thought it time to take the opportunity to build a new theme that would push the new theme engine to it's limits a bit. With that in mind I am happy to introduce the new "Essential" theme.
The idea of this theme, as usual with my themes, is to make the site look as little like Moodle as possible. In this specific instance, it would be used on sites where Moodle would potentially serve as a company homepage rather than just a course list.
Cool things to know about the theme.
- It only uses 6 images.
- Most of what you think are "graphics" are actually the Awesome font
- The slider on the frontpage of the demo site is completely customisable through theme settings
- I am really trying to push what Bootstrap Grids can do. As such the theme is fully responsive.
- The footer is all custom Moodle regions. This means blocks can be added. The footer of the demo site is full of HTML blocks in this instance
- The Theme uses Google web fonts to give it that extra bit of shazam!
- Social Network icons appear at the top of the page dynamically based on theme settings
- The entire color scheme can be modified with theme settings (like on Rocket)
- The homepage main area is just a label. The theme will ship with custom classes that you can set for tables and links to modify their formatting. No knowledge of code is needed as you can use the text editor to do this. Documentation will be provided outlining what the additional classes are.
- New theme setting to have user image show in the header when logged in.
- Admin can choose to revert courses to a "standard" layout with blocks on the left and right sides
- Admin can choose the default Navbar/breadcrumb seperator
- Font Awesome now loaded and cached through lib.php. Should improve performance
- Minor CSS fixes
A video showing many of the core features is available for viewing at https://vimeo.com/channels/moodleman
If you would like to see it in action, head to this year's iMoot site at http://2013.imoot.org
As always, documentation is a work in progress. Availbale documentation is available at http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Essential_theme
If you have questions you can post them in the official discussion moodle.org forum at https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=231970