NewSchool Learning

New FREE Theme - Afterburner

We’ve just finished work on our first free Moodle theme of the new year.

It’s called Afterburner after the GPL theme of the same design created by Rocket Theme and is unique for a number of reasons:

• It uses the layout-table overflow fix I mentioned on my blog a couple days ago. This fix ensures that all content wraps fully within the theme regardless of the width of that content in relation to the screen.
• It’s our first released theme that uses the YUI dropdown menu included in the Moodle core.
• One of those dropdown menus is automatically generated with the course list of the logged in user.
• The wrapper DIVs that hold the background images and margins are included inside conditional PHP statements that keep these wrappers out of popup windows. Therefore, your messages and chats, and help boxes will all render as they should.

You can demo the theme on our server, or just download it today!

Superfresh Update

Our most popular theme just got a whole lot better with an awesome upgrade.

Here’s what’s been changed:

• The menu has been swapped out for the same menu used in Accentuate - complete with multi-level dropdown menus and automatic “My Courses” menu for logged in users.
• The page wrappers have been suppressed from popup windows and various other places they don’t belong. This is an exciting change for me as it represents years of experience finally coming to a complete picture of how Moodle themes flow and function. No more CSS hacks here.
• Selecting style variant colors is now as easy as renaming a file.

A lot of work went into this upgrade, making Superfresh one of our best looking and most stable themes ever! If you’ve previously purchased Superfresh and would like a free upgrade, forward us a copy of your download email and we’ll renew your download link so you can get a new copy.

If you haven’t yet purchased Superfresh, what are you waiting for!

Accentuate: Our Most Advanced Theme Yet

I’m pleased to announce the release of Accentuate - the newest and most advanced Premium Theme from NewSchool Learning.

Besides the fact that it looks great, here are just a few reasons why you’ll like it:

Four Color Choices

Each theme download comes with four color variants: blue, green, red, and black. Changing colors is as easy as renaming a file.

Dynamic Logo Finder

Want to use your logo? Accentuate looks inside its image directory for an image called logo.png. If it finds one, it displays it. If doesn’t, it shows your site name and description. It’s that simple.

Dropdown Menus

Accentuate uses a stable javascript dropdown menu that looks good in every browser. And, we’ve included a “My Courses” dropdown that dynamically pulls the courses for the logged in user.

Get it today!

Meet Olivia

I’m proud and happy to officially announce the addition of Olivia Freeman to our team. Olivia has been working with our clients as Project Manager since November, and has quickly made herself an indispensable member of our team.

Prior to joining NewSchool Learning, Olivia worked at a large international law firm where she managed all aspects of Attorney Development. At the law firm, she supported the needs of over 900 attorneys while coordinating, marketing and executing all in-house attorney training.

Olivia has taken over Nick’s previous responsibilities handling all our incoming correspondence and working with each project to ensure a quality theme and experience is delivered to everyone we work with, every time. Basically, it’s her job to keep things running smoothly so Nick and I can focus on making themes.

If you have a custom Moodle theme you’d like us to work on, drop her a line.

Introducing the Premium Theme Club

We’re pleased to announce the opening of our new Premium Theme Club, which provides two tiers of access to all the Premium Moodle themes in our library.

• Standard Club Members have immediate access to our new Members’ Area where they can download all our themes (current and future) for one full year. The cost of Standard Club Membership is just $125.00. Licensing for Standard Club Membership is still limited to sites you personally own and manage.
• Developer Club Members have a full year of access to our Members’ Area, too. They also get all of our downloadable source files to alter themes for their clients, priority support from our team, and license to use our themes on an unlimited number of sites that they create or manage for their clients. The cost of Developer Club Membership is only $245.00.

To join the club, compare membership types, and see our frequently asked questions about the club, look here.

Of course, let us know if you have questions beyond those we’ve already answered.

Premium Moodle Themes

We’re pleased to announce the reopening of a “Themes” section on our site. We made our name selling and giving away attractive Moodle designs. After nearly six months of tweaking and adjusting our site and our business, we’re happy to have them back.

At this moment, we have 17 Moodle themes available for download. Nine are free. The other eight are Premium Themes - themes that are generally more complex, include different color variants, and come with a full year of support against bugs on the current Moodle version. They can be purchased for the low cost of $45.

The shopping cart system we use is offered through a unique company called e-junkie. We use their services primarily because they deliver your theme files immediately after purchase is made.

Purchases can be made using any major credit card or by Paypal. If you experience any trouble, please let us know and we’ll gladly sort things out for you.

Of course, if you like one of our designs but need some tweaking done to get it to match your specific brand or colors, we do offer customization services starting at only $245!

New Free Moodle Theme - Leatherbound

After releasing Greenie last night, I felt a bit inspired, so I’m happy to release a second free theme this week - Leatherbound.

Leatherbound is another admittedly simple, lightweight theme that can be easily modified to use any color combination. My goal is to create a bunch of these themes now so that the community can pick those they think would work best in the Moodle core for 2.0.

You can download Leatherbound here.

Of course, if you don’t feel comfortable making changes to this theme yourself, keep in mind that we do custom work, too.

New Free Moodle Theme - Greenie

We’re happy to announce the release of our newest free theme for Moodle - Greenie. Greenie is a fluid-width theme that uses no background images to accomplish a modern (if not basic) look and feel.

This theme will undoubtedly make it into the Moodle core for the 2.0 release. Since the themes engine for 2.0 is still being worked on, we’ve coded it here for 1.9.

You can download Greenie here.

Of course, if you don’t like green, keep in mind that we do custom work, too.

Premium Moodle Themes

Update: You are certainly free to use these links to make your purchase, but we’re pleased to announce that the Themes section of our site is back up and running.

We’ve been getting a lot of requests for our Premium Themes. They are still available, but we’re reworking on the back end of the site to sell them again. In the meantime, I’d like to provide the links where they can be purchased since the old shopping cart mechanisms are still in place.

Parchment

Demo | Purchase - $45

Superfresh

Demo | Purchase - $45

Equinox

Demo | Purchase - $45

Vitality

Demo | Purchase - $45

Convertible

Demo | Purchase - $45

Envy

Demo | Purchase - $45

Solstice

Demo | Purchase - $45

All downloads begin automatically after payment has been made.

All downloads include all theme color variants shown in the demo.

Service Package Details

I’ve just added a page for each of our custom Moodle theme packages, detailing what the work entails. You can find links to these pages on our service summary table. The details I’ve provided are brief, but should give you an idea of what to expect in terms of our process and timeline.

Of course, no two projects are ever exactly alike. So, drop us a line explaining your project and we’ll gladly fill in the details related to your specific needs.

Portfolio of our Work

I stole some time from my weekend to put together a well overdue portfolio of our work. Nick has been getting an increasing number of requests to see custom work that we’ve done for our past clients. I hope this does the job.

I have only added a small handful of our most recent clients, but I’ll continue adding themes from our past and future from here on out. The nice thing about moving to ExpressionEngine for managing our content is that adding new entries to our portfolio is as easy as writing to this blog.

The goal of the portfolio is to highlight our work and give you an idea of what we’ve done in the past. The descriptions will tell you what the client gave us at the start of the project and what we gave back in return. If you have any questions about a past project, feel free to let us know.

Most of the entries have links to the clients’ live site. Others do not. I’ll do my best to provide live links whenever I can.

Project Management

I’d like to formally welcome our new (and first) project manager, Nick Gutschow.

Nick has been a friend of mine since we took German together our junior year at Michigan State University. After earning his bachelor’s degree in Analytic Philosophy, he moved to Taiwan to study and learn Mandarin Chinese. While there, he co-owned Intangible Logic, Inc, a brand development and design company where he oversaw many large projects covering not only web design, but print media and video development, marketing services, and exhibition design as well.

Nick’s role at NewSchool Learning is to take care of our clients. He answers all of our incoming emails and works in close liaison with our designers to ensure a quality theme and experience is delivered to everyone we work with, every time. He’s a genuinely great guy to work with and we’re very lucky to have him on board. If you have a project that you’d like to get started on, let him know.

NewSchool Learning Gets a Facelift

I’m happy to announce the fifth redesign of NewSchool Learning in two years. While we still have a bit of work to do to get everything looking great and fully functioning, the essentials are certainly all here.

Most notably missing is our “themes” page. We’ll have that back up soon, I promise. We’re going to take our time to sort through our existing stockpile of themes. Some will inevitably make their way into Moodle 2.0. Others will get completely refreshed or recoded before they return for download here. A few of our older themes may never return. As we go through our inventory, we’ll keep you posted on what ends up where.

In the meantime, you can still download our free themes directly from the database on Moodle.org.

If you happen to notice something glaringly ugly over the next couple days, please be patient while we do some additional testing. This site is built on ExpressionEngine, which is flexible but new for us.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let us know. All in all, we hope to have the site completely back together within the next couple of months, but that deadline will be largely influenced by the amount of custom work we have coming in. If our business over the past two months is an indicator of the business we’ll have for the next two months, I wouldn’t hold your breath. Regardless of the pace, we’ll keep you informed.

Update: Everything appears to be working fine now in all browsers. Let us know if we missed anything.