I’m spending a fair amount of my time now working on and supporting a medium-sized Moodle installation. I will not sugar coat it: Moodle is far from my favourite piece of web software — its considerable UI complexity being my chief complaint — but it does do a reasonable job and it has a rich enough feature set to make it quite an asset in the education world.

This complexity to Moodle sometimes doesn’t exactly make it easy to do the right thing as a developer, and working with themes could be somewhere where developers diverge from best practices. The temptation to clone your favourite theme just to make a few tweaks here and there leaves people unable to track changes to the base theme, and keep their site up-to-date.

So, I have put together a video showing how you can create a custom theme (a child theme in WordPress parlance) that inherits mostly from your base theme, but allows you to override CSS and even bits of the HTML structure of Moodle’s generated pages.

I think it’s actually an easier process than people think!

As always, I welcome feedback, and if you found this particularly helpful, I’m always happy to have a few pennies drop into the PayPal account!

Find this tutorial useful?

A change of scenery here at my personal site has been long overdue, I think, so I’m pleased to usher in 2012 with a refresh of the site’s design!

Keeping Things Compact

The first thing you’ll likely notice is the new compact, fixed header, with the navigation to the major parts of the site. It stays fixed in place, so you can always get back to any of those pages at any time. (It also swaps out the legacy image gradients for exciting new CSS3 gradients where available!)

Who Shot the Serif?

I have also moved away from Bitstream Charter/Georgia as the main font around the site, in favour of Helvetica Neue/Helvetica/Arial, combined with the existing accents of Gill Sans (where available!) for the headings. I think the site now has a more contemporary feel — and reads particularly well on devices where Helvetica Neue is available, like the iPad.

There is also a new webfont in use for the ‘Peter Upfold’ text in the header — Charis SIL (generously licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence).

Practising What I Preach

As a strong proponent of users having control over their privacy online, I am pleased that the Do Not Track initiative, for indicating the user’s preferences about tracking technology on the web, has gained traction in many web browsers. Because I support the rights of users to make choices about the code running in their browsers and what information it is collecting about them, I took this opportunity to begin the implementation of Do Not Track support on my site.

» Read the rest of this post…

It’s been quite a long time since my site and blog have seen any major visual changes. I thought it was about time to give it a visual refresh, so over the past few days, I have put together this new design.

Hopefully, it retains much of the visual identity of its predecessor, while giving a welcome refresh, making things visually cleaner and making it a little less bland than previously.

I particularly like the new main navigation bar, which I think is more attractive and clearer than it used to be, while also removing the old hack I used to get the ‘button’ effect (there is no more ‘button’ effect)!

There are also a lot of changes behind the scenes to make the integration between the non-WordPress portions and the WordPress blog a lot easier.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new design. Comments and suggestions for improvement very welcome!