NewSchool Learning

Superfresh Now Available for Moodle 2.0

Before the holiday, we finished upgrading one of our most popular themes - Superfresh - for Moodle 2.0. After spending some much needed time with family and friends, I’m just uploading it now.

It’s a great theme with the same look and feel as Superfresh for 1.9, but includes a lot of great new features:

• The theme includes ten custom admin settings that allow you to add a logo, tagline, and footer message, and change several colors using a simple integrated color picker.
• The theme uses the new Custom Menu admin interface for quickly adding and editing your Moodle dropdown menu.
• The theme makes use of Moodle 2.0’s new dock.

Buying the new 2.0 theme is quite simple. Just head on over to our themes page and add the theme pack to your cart. The download now contains both themes for Moodle 1.9 and Moodle 2.0.

Want to see the demo? Here it is.

And, as always, if you have any questions, let us know.

Accentuate Now Available for Moodle 2.0

I’m happy to announce the release of our first Premium Theme to be upgraded for Moodle 2.0 - Accentuate.

As you may or may not know, our focus for the past few months has been working on a new set of attractive themes to go into the Moodle 2.0 core. Well, we didn’t do too bad.

Now that Moodle 2.0 has officially been released, we’re turning our attention to upgrading our Premium Themes. Please be patient. Moodle 2.0 requires that all themes be completely recoded from scratch. While the look and feel will generally stay the same, everything under the hood is different.

So, what’s new?

The upgraded Accentuate theme supports Custom Menus, the new Moodle dock, and a full settings page that allows you to change the theme colors, add a logo, or a tagline.

Buying the Accentuate theme is easy. Just visit our theme page and click the “Add to cart” link underneath the screenshot. The packaged files you’ll get after checkout include both the 1.9 and the 2.0 version of the theme.

Of course, if you have any questions, please let us know.

Theme Contest Winner

Over the past week, while the community has been rating the themes submitted to our Moodle 2.0 theme contest, we’ve been testing them out and looking over the underlying code. While we’re extremely pleased by the high quality of themes submitted by all of the contestants, this is a contest with a magical prize, so we’re going to have to declare one winner.

In the end, the Grand Prize winning theme is one that was highly rated by the community, is cleanly coded with few (if any) display errors, and makes creative use of the Moodle 2 Theme Engine. I’m pleased to announce that the winner of our Moodle 2.0 Theme Contest, and the proud new owner of a 16GB iPad, is Caroline Kennedy for her theme called Splash.

In addition to winning the iPad, Caroline’s theme will also be included in the Moodle 2.0 core along with other submitted themes that we’ll announce next week.

We’d like to again thank all who participated in our contest - both the theme designers as well as the raters/commenters. It’s always nice to see a positive community response to an event that strengthens Moodle overall.

Moodle 2.0 Theme Contest

I’m pleased to announce that we’re officially taking submissions for our Moodle 2.0 Theme Contest. Since full contest rules and selection criteria can be found on the contest page, I won’t bother repeating that information here. I will say, though, that we’re giving away a new 16GB Wi-Fi iPad to the contest winner, which will be announced on July 16, 2010.

The goals of this competition are to:

• encourage community members to learn the new Moodle 2.0 theme engine. A lot (everything) has changed in the way themes are rendered from 1.x to 2.0. Every theme created for Moodle 1.x will have to be recoded for 2.0. We need an active and knowledgeable community of theme developers to ensure the successful use of this new and powerful theme engine.
• highlight how great Moodle 2.0 can look by selecting 20 themes to be included inside every Moodle 2.0 download. The new theme engine provides developers with a lot more flexibility than they had with Moodle 1.x.
• Spark innovation through competition. I think the 2.0 release represents a great opportunity to increase the appeal of Moodle by allowing developers to create a more diverse collection of themes. Let’s make Moodle beautiful together!

If you have any questions about the contest, please feel free to post them in our new Support Community Forums. We’re always happy to help out.

I look forward to seeing what the community can create. Good luck!

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!

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.

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.