When my supervisor and I sat down and talked about changing some things in how Moodle behaves, we looked to creating a theme to enhance some things. We wanted a simple, yet stylish look to the Moodle site. We wanted the user experience to be focused on logging in and interacting with the learning content. We believed that a simpler layout was needed for the Moodle homepage and that in order to see the Moodle homepage you should first be logged in. Once logged in the focus should be on enrolling in a course or going directly to your courses and activities. With the evolve-D theme we had a laser-like focus and eliminated any distractions commonly found on Moodle homepages. This has and will continue to be the main areas that the evolve-D theme seeks to address.
The theme is based on the default “More” theme found in Moodle core. We wanted to create a theme that would be compatible with future versions of Moodle to make updating easier. We really didn’t plan on sharing the theme. I was creating it just for our own site. In the spirit of contributing to the Moodle community I put it up in the plugin directory and shared it with others. I am not a programmer and I am sure I can clean up the code a bit.
In a one year period the evolve-D theme has been downloaded over 43,000 times and is in production on over 1500 websites that are sending usage data back to Moodle.org. Along the way with feedback from the Moodle community we were able to add some new features and fix styling issues that were identified.
https://moodle.org/plugins/stats.php?plugin=theme_evolved
Thank you to all who had a nice word to say about the theme. I appreciate the feedback. It is a tough job fielding all the support requests and issues that arise when you put a plugin out in the wild.
