Open Source – A Right Choice For CMS Development

In the year 1996, there were no proprietary content management systems, and Microsoft was still releasing the notion of the web as a possible platform for business or eCommerce activity.

In any case, if a website required any kind of functionality, unless one could find anything at Matt’s Script Archive to achieve the task. Slowly, the time passed and most of the people continued to make use of the open source solution.

Opt-in emails list managers, slide shows, employment opportunity listings, shopping carts, content editors, contact forms and many more all are built as open source using PHP. After some time, the content management systems emerged in the market, containing a package – there are lots of functional elements that relied upon our own resources to develop.

WordPress, Drupal and Joomla are coming out as the default new development platforms for various digital agencies, which had followed the same path. Then, some platforms came such as Magento and Concrete5 that began with a view to finally change into enterprise solutions with a price tag designed to get profit motives.

However, the earlier efforts of their foundational community editions were fueled by the passion of development communities, who helped in generating the main functionality. Along with these, a lot of $5, $50 and $100 plugins and extensions came-up to add custom functionality to meet client’s requirements.

Individual developers can make changes to meet more demanding client requirements because the open source model extended to plugins and extensions.

And all of this was designed to run on license-fee-free Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP operating systems running on low-overhead hardware. The main thread was that all of these were - still are – tools that are generated by people with a common purpose.

That major reason was the idea to help out the Internet achieve its importance by offering businesses, organizations and individuals with incredibly robust, but affordable web presence.

During this time period, a lot of software companies made use of investment money to develop expensive proprietary content management and eCommerce systems that designed to run on operating systems and databases with huge licensing fees.

It gives the opportunity for huge amount of money to change hands for the mega-corporations with wide budget, which used to spend thousands of dollars on everything they do. It is all right because it is your business model.

For smaller digital agencies, it is mush difficult to begin with web development project looking a lot of dollars pass through from the client to the software companies to develop the development platform.

It takes huge amount of money, which could have been used to develop more functionality for inbound marketing and other improvements. Furthermore, the solution has also delivered huge flexibility and customization possibilities to deliver the client with user experience and back end functionality to the particular requirements and business model.

There are lots of closed source proprietary systems that are doing only opposite, pressurizing the business to accept the rules and functionality. The open source model is the right choice for businesses as smart digital agencies are aware that if delivering value, total customization and return on investment are important components to their brand and value proposition.

Stay connected with us to get more information on open source and its solutions as here we keep updating important information that you must know. In any case, if you are facing in problem while executing open source solution, you can hire our expert open source developer, who has hands-on experience.

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A Complete Step-by-Step Guide For Creating a Moodle Theme

Today, Moodle is a widely used free-source eLearning application that is also well-known as Course Management System, Learning Management and Virtual Learning Environment.

This high-end platform can be termed as education software on which you can easily expand educational application without any hassle. Moreover, Moodle can be used for alloyed learning, flipped classroom, distance education and other e-Learning projects in schools, workplaces, universities and other sectors.

If you already use Moodle for your project of school, university, institute and other eLearning sectors, you may want to give the best look to your website that is possible with theme.

Developing an effective and eye-catching Moodle theme becomes a lot easier with us as here we have given a complete step-by-step guide for developing a Moodle Theme. In this blog, you can find information on how to develop a theme for Moodle 2.0 and Moodle 2.1.

Theme Designer Mode -

Moodle is one such platform that does a lot of things in terms of performance under normal operation. One of these is to merge all the CSS into one file, minimize it, cache it on the service and then serve it. The cached version is served to mainly enhance page performance after the first request.

After making some of the changes, you are not able to see them immediately. However, you need to tell Moodle platform to rebuild the cache, which is serving. For designing themes, this was not practical, so the theme designer mode was added. This mode tells Moodle not to mix or cache the CSS when enabled as it gets delivered.

Get Started -

Initially, you have to do is to develop the directories and files that you will be using. You have to create the real directory for your theme. It is necessary that it must be the name of your theme and it is excitement. Within the theme directory of Moodle, the directory must be located. After that, in that directory, you can develop lots of files that you will require.

Below, you can find files that we wanted to create:

config.php

All of our settings will go here.

/style/

This directory will contain all of our stylesheets.

/style/excitement.css 

All of our css will go in here.

/pix/

Into this directory we'll put a screen shot of our theme as well as our favicon and any images we use in CSS.

/layout/

Our layout files will end up in this directory.

/layout/standard.php 

This will be our one basic layout file.

/lang/en/

The file we put here will make our theme name show properly on the Theme Selector page. You need a few standard entries. Copy the one from the Standard theme and modify is easiest.

You also need to have a directory structure that is similar to what is shown below after this setup step:

Configuring our theme

You need to open config.php in your favorite editor and have to start by adding the opening PHP tags<?php. Now, adding the settings:

$THEME->name = 'excitement';

It is extremely simple to tell Moodle the name of your theme, and if you ever have few config.php files open, it will be helpful for you to recognize that which one is best.

Afterwards, the parents for this theme:

$THEME->parents = array('base');

It informs Moodle that my new theme “excitement” wanted to extend the base theme. A single has the capability to extend any number of themes. Instead of developing a fully new theme and copying all of the CSS, you just have to develop a new theme, widen the theme you like and add the changes that you are looking to add in your themes.

However, the main aim of the base theme as it delivers us with a basic layout and enough CSS to make everything simple. Let's inform Moodle about our style sheets:

$THEME->sheets = array('excitement');

The final thing that need to add into theme's config.php file is the definition of the layouts for our theme.

Configuring The Language File

Open theme_base.php file from base/lang/en/theme_base.php

Save it as excitement/lang/en/theme_excitement.php

Change

$string['pluginname'] = 'Base';

to

$string['pluginname'] = 'Excitement';

Now, the new theme name must be showed properly in the Theme Selector:Site Administration > Appearance > Themes > Theme Selector

You are also capable of editing the theme description.

$string['choosereadme'] = 'Write your theme description here.';

In place, you should leave the following two lines in order to avoid notices while editing blocks etc.:

$string['region-side-post'] = 'Right';

$string['region-side-pre'] = 'Left';

Writing The Layout File

However, the excitement theme just has one layout file. The drawback of it is that you have to make the layout file that foes everything while the upside is that you only have to maintain one file.

Apart from the maintenance, making use of multiple layout files deliver a lot of advantages to actual world themes in which you can simply tweak and customize particular layouts in order to achieve the goals of the organization with the help of theme.

It is also good to comprehend the two most important objects, which will be used in your layout files: $OUTPUT and $PAGE before learning more.

Adding Some CMS

Both complete the theme is now usable and starting to look like a real theme with config.php and standard.php. However, if you change it using the theme selector, you can notice that it still lacks any style. While writing code, Moodle developers pleased to not use inline styles anywhere. It is a great as themers because there is nothing in Moodle, which cannot be styled using CSS.

Moodle CSS Basics

When it comes to talking about the Moodle 2.0, all the CSS for the complete Moodle is delivered. It was done due to performance reasons. Now, Moodle is reading all of the CSS, mixing it into one file, shrinking it removing any white space, caches it and delivers it.

Begin to Write Excitement.css

For the theme, it is not all of the CSS, but it is adequate to style the front page when the user is not logged in. You also need to remember that this theme expands the base theme, so there is already CSS for layout.

Making Use of Images within CSS

Now, its time for adding image files to the pix directory of the theme. It is must to add the background image for theme and header and headings also.

Adding a Screenshot and Favicon

However, the main thing that needs to add both a screenshot for this theme and a favicon for it. In the theme selector screen, the screenshot will be shown and must be named as screenshot.jpg. When someone bookmarks this page, the favicon can be used. Both images must be located in your themes pix directory as follows:

• /theme/excitement/pix/screenshot.jpg
• /theme/excitement/pix/favicon.ico

So, above mentioned complete step-by-step guide can help you to develop a perfect Moodle theme that best meet your requirements and deliver a right theme for you.

Source : https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Creating_a_theme

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