Patrick Malley

Back in October, a new Moodle user stumbled into the General Developer forum at Moodle.org and asked a very simple question (paraphrased):

Why doesn’t Moodle allow designers more flexibility in editing the template of a page?

As things currently are, Moodle theme developers can edit the template for the header (everything before the sideblocks begin) and the footer (everything from “You are logged in as …” down). That’s it. Everything in between is generated by the Moodle core code, and any edits made to it would have to be remade with every upgrade.

If you’ve ever used Joomla or Wordpress, you know that there is a wide variety of different themes available for those systems. This is largely due to the flexibility that these systems provide in letting theme designers rearrange the items that appear on every page through the use of templates.

Moodle lacks this flexibility.

Urs Hunkler, Moodle’s “theme manager” has joined the argument in favor of creating a template system in the Moodle core. With such a template system, any page could theoretically be pulled into the theme folder, rearranged, cleaned up, or embellished to suit your school’s or business’s needs.

Here’s Urs:

One major design task is to create the best possible positive impact within a certain task and context … and the solution must be different from task to task. If not design fails.

and, while I’m at it, here’s another meaningful paragraph from his argument (which I recommend you read in it’s entirety because it’s good):

Moodle theme changes with CSS are mostly like changing the wallpapers in a building. When you need a different experience you need to change the walls of the building. Multi functional buildings therefor [sic] offer “movable” walls.

His point, which I agree with, is that Moodle’s current form forces a layout onto institutions, but that layout does not work well in all cases. Take, for instance, the use of Moodle in an elementary (primary) school. Couldn’t a better layout for Moodle be realized for this group of users? If so, shouldn’t the software allow for such layouts to be created, separate from Moodle core code?

Here’s where Urs, and all theme developers, need your help. Implementing such a template system will be long and costly work, so the core developers need concrete use cases to motivate them to make this happen. Have you ever thought about changing something in Moodle only to learn that doing so would require core code editing?

I’ll try my best over the next couple of weeks to share my thoughts and ideas, as well as scour my email archives and forums for change requests that I could not support. Please do the same.