1.6 theme upgrade
Moodle1.6
Which areas in Moodle have changed?
The semantic structure of Moodle pages
For better orientation of non visual Moodle users it is important to build a semantic structure for all Moodle pages. The skeleton are the headers h1 to h3. Details follow...
The header
For the semantic structure of the Moodle pages the "headermain" area is no longer built with a div but with a "h1" element. (See header.html)
A link to the relevant Moodle Docs page is added. (See footer.html)
The "breadcrumb"
For better accessibility and more flexible visual design, the xhtml structure of the navbar (called the breadcrumb trail) has been changed to an unordered list.
The » character has been converted to an image with empty 'Alt' text (pix/a/r_breadcrumb.gif) - see #Resizable Icons.
The sideblocks
Documentation about the changes to follow...
The questions
Documentation about the changes to follow... (--Urs Hunkler)
The Image borders
Previously Moodle added a 1 pixel wide black border to all user images, since 1.6 this is not done. If you wish to retain such a black border (or a green, red or blue border) you can add it via css. Old user images will retain their black border if you are upgrading from a previous version but there is a script (userpix/upgrade.php) that can be run by an admin to process all images and remove the border.
Resizable Icons
To improve accessibility, a number of characters which are confusing in their current context are being replaced by images, for example '>' on the Forums Search button is spoken by Screen-reader software as "greater" ("search" or "go" is more appropriate). These images (and other icons in the future) are resizable with the text using Ctrl+Mouse Wheel in Firefox and Internet Explorer 6 (to some extent).
The images have a class "resize", are in directory "pix/a", are prefixed with "r_" and are designed to be 1em square (or a multiple of; based on the letter M at default font size). Naturally, the pixels become visible as you resize, though this can be mitigated by making the 'real' image 2ems, or 21 by 23 pixels.
This is work in progress, currently resizable: breadcrumb separator », search button >, mini calendar previous and next month links < >.
What is new in the Moodle 1.6 standard theme?
The following pages give you an overview of the changes in the header, footer and the CSS files from the actual 1.5.x to 1.6. When you open the linked pages you will see all changes made in that file.
You can add these changes to your theme header, footer and CSS files to update them for Moodle 1.6.
These html pages show only those parts of the files which are different, not the whole file. The line numbers of the 1.5 and 1.6 files will help you locate the areas. If you need to apply the changes to completely different files, you may search for the old (1.5) property in your files and replace it with the new/changed one.
I will update these files with any changes regularly (every day when possible) until Moodle 1.6 is released.
--Urs Hunkler 03:49, 13 March 2006 (WST)
See also
- Using Moodle RFC - Accessibility Proposal forum discussion
