In order to work and deal with Moodle themes, we need to have access to the server, if we are to have Moodle 3 on-premises and are not using MoodleCloud hosted services. In the event that we want to change Moodle themes in MoodleCloud, we need to have access as an administrator. An important element to take into account is that when we need to change the themes in MoodleCloud, there happens to be more restrictions than when dealing with an already installed Moodle platform.

A Moodle theme changes the look and feel of Moodle, that is to say, it is a template that controls the way Moodle looks. An administrator can change Moodle themes through the administrative interface of Moodle. The theme does not change Moodle but it changes the way it looks. It can be useful to change the look of a Moodle site according to the place that the Moodle course is being used, not only just to see it in a different way but also in order to cope with the place that it represents...

Moodle themes are part of Moodle plugins but MoodleCloud does not support plugins, therefore, as it has already been mentioned before, themes in MoodleCloud are limited. As a default, MoodleCloud has the More theme, as stated in the MoodleCloud website: https://moodle.com/cloud/faq/ , and it is shown in the following screenshot:

In order to change the MoodleCloud theme in a simple way, we can follow these steps:

HTML is found on all those pages that we find on the Internet. What we see on the screen has HTML code behind it. It also includes font colors, therefore we can change the color of text using HTML tags.

HTML tags are a bit complex. But we do not need to master the HTML standard in order to change colors. We can change colors using HTML code in a simple way. We can use a dynamic HTML color-code chart or an HTML code picker, such as the ones offered by the HTML Color Codes website: http://html-color-codes.info/ .

We can click on one of the color boxes in the chart and the site will display the selected color code, as shown in the following screenshot:

In this case, the selected color code is #FE642E. HTML codes define a color using a symbol (#) and a group of three two-digit hexadecimal numbers. Thus, we will see the # followed by six letters (A-F) or numbers (0-9). The three two-digit hexadecimal numbers represent the intensity of the red, green, and blue...

More is a customizable theme which makes it easy to choose the desired colors for the MoodleCloud or Moodle platform course. Another important asset about this theme is that if you do not know how to create or develope a theme from scratch, More allows us to choose different colors.

In this case, we are customizing More from a Moodle platform course. The steps are the same for MoodleCloud. There are some steps that we have to follow in order to customize More:

We can customize Moodle themes within Theme settings so that they are assigned to different contexts such as site, users, courses, and categories. Therefore, we can have one site theme but we can choose a different course or category theme. We just have to customize the settings in order to allow it and make it possible.

Users can choose their preferred theme on the Edit profile page. All the Moodle pages will show the theme which has been chosen by the user. in order to enable a user to change the theme, we must click on Allow user themes within Site Administration | Appearance | Themes | Theme settings. Click on Allow user themes, as shown in the following screenshot:

Then scroll down the page and click on Save changes.

Any user with the proper permissions, including teachers with editing permissions, can change to the desired theme in order to design the course theme. Course theme overrides site themes, user themes, or session themes. In other words, if a user has set a theme and the editing teacher has set the course theme, the course theme is the one which is going to be seen instead of the one chosen by the user.

In order to allow an editing teacher to design a course theme, we must follow these steps:

There is the option of choosing a theme by category. It is not advisable to work with it since there is a warning tip because it may affect performance. Category themes affect other course themes:

The Moodle theme directory can be found at Local Disk C:/Moodle30/server/moodle/theme, as shown in the following screenshot:

The directory has the following Moodle themes as standard: base, bootstrapbase, canvas, clean, and more. When we click on any of these Moodle themes, we can display a list of folders and files which are contained in the Moodle theme. For instance, in this case, we click on moodle | theme | more and these are the files and folders that we can find, as shown in the following screenshot:

Each Moodle theme file and folder contains information and can be edited so as to customize Moodle themes. We will deal with these folders in later chapters; so far, we have learned where to locate Moodle themes and their folders.