Recently I've been working flat out on a new Moodle theme.  It's heavily AJAX driven and very web 2.0. 

My aim is to create one of the most beautiful and most user-friendly themes available to the Moodle Community.

The theme currently has smooth dropdown menus, customisable colour palettes, real-time font size changer, column selectors and much more including a dynamic dashboard style panel.

Today I created the first ever Moodle themed persona for Firefox 3.6!

To view it please visit: http://bit.ly/d7ZJgc

I hope to create many more!

 As promised, I have released the Moodle Bar.   The release date coinsides with the iMoot 2010.

It is available direct from this website by following this link:

http://bit.ly/du5RNQ

Please feel free to use it, hack it, modify it and do with it what you will.

Do send me an email though so I can see it in action on your Moodle sites.

I am very pleased and proud to announce that Leeds City College have chosen Moodle as the new college VLE. The decision to use Moodle as the single VLE will help lead the college in its vision to relentlessly pursue excellence and innovation, and because it's free it promotes the colleges value and commitment to an efficient use of resources and helps to ensure future solvency.

I am now gearing up to release several of my coding projects into the Open Source World.  These will be released over the next 4 months and will be available for download via this website and moodle.org.

I am working quite exhaustively on the following Moodle projects:

Moodle Bar
Course Report Block
Twitter Block with support for Moodle Bar status updates
Twitter Wall Activity for Moodle
Moodle Task List as a block
Moodle Glass Theme and Moodle Professional Theme

and finally...the big one....

I have just finished an early release of my Moodle Twitter Block.  The block simply allows you to post a tweet to a Twitter account.  At present it asks you to enter your Twitter username and password but I will be customising this to pull the data from user profile fields already in Moodle.  A lot of work has already been done on a similar block by M3 (http://m3.jiscemerge.org.uk/) but I wanted to create my

My Moodle bar is almost ready for public release.  I have cleaned the code up (a lot), the bar now installs with just one simple PHP include tag in the footer of your Moodle theme.  The buttons now have a CSS based tooltip rollover (like Facebook).  I just have a few Internet Explorer 7 glitches to take care of.

I am also planning a notifications module for the bar which will alert users of messages, deadlines and calendar events.

Unless you are sat in front of your Moodle installation 24 hours a day, how will you know if the site goes down?  Wouldn't it be nice to receive an email or a text if Moodle stops responding?  I happened to stumble upon the website below:

As many of you may know, journal feedback in Moodle is via a text box and not a WYSIWYG editor.  So when a tutor leaves feedback containing an apostrophe, a stripslash (backslash) is inserted into the text.  This is fine and I understand the (MySQL) reasons why, however... my tutors do not!  Each time a tutor saves new feedback, an extra stripslash is added. After many edits the feedback is littered with stripslashes.

Today I finished working on a new learning resource for our photography department.  As part of the course, tutors must explain how to correct exposure using aperture and shutter speeds.  I was approached by a member of staff who had the idea of a Flash resource.  I have not really used Flash since version 8 so the new CS3 interface was an eye-opener!  But after a few hours I was able to create the resource below: