Downloading New Moodle Themes

NOTE: Moodle 1.9 themes are not compatible with Moodle 2.0. This tutorial is focused on how to download and use Moodle 2.0 compatible themes.

General Information:
There is a tutorial which explains how to create a Moodle 2.0 theme from scratch. Web-designers should have no trouble creating a Moodle 2.0 theme. The URL to this tutorial is given below:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:_Themes_2.0_creating_your_first_theme

Another great place to get standards based, Moodle 2.0 themes from is:
http://newschoollearning.com/theme/submissions/
This website is a Moodle partner website, hence we’ve chosen to recommend and use their free themes.

The theme chosen for this exercise is the Aadvark Pro Original theme.

Go to http://www.moodle.org and click on the Downloads as shown in diagram 1.

Diagram 1

The Moodle downloads page will be displayed in the Browser as shown in diagram 2.

Diagram 2

Scroll down a little bit on this page.

The Themes link is located just below the Modules and Plugins link. As shown in diagram 2. Click the Themes link. The themes download page will be displayed in the Browser as shown in diagram 3.

Diagram 3. The Moodle themes download page

Scroll to the bottom of the page and locate the Search Box as shown in diagram 4.

Diagram 4

Enter – Aardvark Lite for Moodle 2.0 – which is the name of theme that must be downloaded and hit the Enter key. The page from which this theme can be downloaded is displayed in the Browser as shown in diagram 5.

Diagram 5

NOTE: Just below the theme’s name there is the indicator that this theme requires Moodle 2.0.X.
NOTE: To check if any theme is Moodle 2.0.X compatible on these download pages simply read the information below the theme name. This indicates whether a theme is compatible with Moodle 2.0 or not.

Click the download link. Save the downloaded zip file to a folder on the hard disk. Unzip and extract the contents of this zip file in the same folder. The contents of the zip file is a folder named aardvark_lite which contains all the resources that are required by the theme.

Changing The Current Moodle Theme

Copy the entire aardvark_lite folder into the /themes folder where Moodle has been installed. The path to this theme’s resources will be - /themes/aardvark_lite.

In the left hand side column there is a set of Menu links as shown in diagram 6. Here is the - Menu item path - to reach the page from where the current template can be changed.

The theme selector page is in displayed in the Browser as shown in diagram 7.

Diagram 7

Adjacent to each theme there are two buttons as shown in diagram 8.

Diagram 8

Click the top button - Use for modern browsers - to install this theme to work in all modern Browsers.
Click the bottom button - Use for old browsers - to install this theme to work in older version of Browsers.

The button to use is normally chosen depending on which type of Browser is used by people who frequently use this Moodle website. When in doubt I suggest choosing - Use for modern browsers.

In this case the Aavardak Lite theme was chosen. The top button - Use for modern browsers – was clicked on the theme change process with initiated and the output was as shown in diagram 9.

Diagram 9

The default Moodle theme was successfully changed.

NOTE: Remember that themes that are compatible with Moodle 1.9 are not compatible with Moodle 2.0.

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