Shaun Daubney does it again… another awesome aardvark theme

It never rains but it pours… quite fitting that while it’s chucking it down outside I’m doing the same with Moodle theming posts!

I’ve taken my time getting into Moodle 2.2 as our 1.9 site had so much customisation I was finding it difficult to see something within the newer themes that would move us forward. Was considering just buying one in then saw the latest version of the aardvark theme (Blackbird) and the old enthusiasm came back 😀

I think Shaun should change his middle name to “Awesome” as that’s what I kept saying when I first loaded up the theme, really does look the part and gave me the base I wanted to start tweaking.

Additions so far…

• silk icon pack (see previous post and SkyDrive for download package if you want it for your site)
• subtle gradient background tweak (sorry Mr. Goldfish!)
• minor text styling, spacing and colour tweaks to give a nod to our current theme

One thing I noticed when about to demo to a colleague was that the menu wasn’t appearing when not logged in (and in IE this also made the entire top bar disappear). After asking on Moodle.org I had a thought that it was probably an intentional choice rather than a bug and sure enough found the answer in layout/general.php

The bit in caps was added by me, as were the 3 lines commented out afterwards…

<?php 

 /* TO SHOW MENU AT ALL TIMES - REMOVE THE 3 LINES BELOW */

 /* if (!isloggedin() or isguestuser()) { */
 /* } */
 /* else */

 if ($hascustommenu) { ?>
 

<?php } ?>
 <?php include('profileblock.php')
 ?>

The menu now shows the entire time and displays correctly in IE, Chrome and Firefox

The profile dropdown is one of my favourite parts of the  theme, looking at the “TBC” block space it looked too tempting to not put something there so I took my SkyDrive \ Web Apps block I made for 1.9 and tried it in the gap… the result… very good 🙂

The SkyDrive icon came from the official Microsoft branding pack, get it here

One thing that’s driving me nuts is how to get the entire background of the icons to highlight (currently it only goes about half way up) and also need to add the auto hide function for non-Live@Edu users then I’ll put it in the usual place for anyone who wants it. Shame in a way that this will be replaced with Office 365, as yet no native Moodle integration exists (or seems to be planned) for the new system but if something appears I’ll be on it in a flash!