Moodle 2.0 themes; Pieter van der Hijden; Sofos Consultancy, 2011. Overview of the standard Moodle 2.0 themes and the parameters accessible for system administrators.

1. Moodle 2.0 themes
Pieter van der Hijden (pvdh@sofos.nl) - 3 April 2011
Sofos Consultancy, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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2. 1 Introduction
The look and feel of a Moodle site is highly dependent on the "Theme". Technically, a "Theme" is a
set of Cascading Style Sheets, developing them is a professional job: designing the look and feel and
building it into style sheets.
At site level the theme policy may be selected:
• one theme to be used for the whole site
• each course category may have its own theme
• each course may have its own theme
• each user may select his/her favourite theme
When migrating from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.0, themes are not migrated. The new Moodle 2.0
version comes with 17 new built-in themes. Many of them can be customised easily by changing
some parameter settings. In this way it is possible to fine tune a built-in theme to let it fit your house
style. If that is not sufficient, it is always possible to let some specialists develop your own theme.
Content of this memo:
• The Gallery chapter gives a visual impression of the 17 standard themes Moodle 2.0 has on
board.
• The Settings chapter lists the settings of each of the standard themes that can be changed by the
system administrator and gives an example of the look and feel of a modified built-in theme.
2 Gallery
In the following paragraphs the standard themes Moodle 2.0 has on board are visualised. Note, that
many themes can be changed interactively, e.g. allowing colours of your house style to be used.
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3. 2.1 Anomaly
2.2 Arialist
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4. 2.3 Binarius
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5. 2.4 Boxxie
2.5 Brick
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6. 2.6 Formal White
2.7 Formfactor
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7. 2.8 Fusion
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8. 2.9 Leatherbound
2.10 Magazine
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9. 2.11 Nimble
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10. 2.12 Nonzero
2.13 Overlay
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11. 2.14 Serenity
2.15 Sky High
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12. 2.16 Splash
2.17 Standard
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13. 3 Settings
Many of these themes can be modified via so called parameter settings. The table below lists the
parameter settings that are available for the 16 standard themes.
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1.9 look x
background x
blocks columns x
background color
blocks content x x
background color
column width x x L&R x
footnote x x x x x x
forum back color x
header background x x
color
heading color x x x
hide tag line x
link color x x x x x x
link hover color x x
logo x x x x x x
main color x x
main color accent x
main color link x
menu hover color x
pages header x
content
tagline x x x x
The picture below shows how the "formal white" theme could be modified by changing its parameter
settings (by the system administrator).
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