Hi Ian,

Our approach to theming has been to add the bare minimum extra styles to the moodle 'standard' theme, to make Totara's layout work. Everything else (colours, etc) has been put into the Totara theme.

What that means in practice is that you should be able to take a 'standard' moodle theme and it will largely work in Totara, what you'll be missing is 'pretty' styles on Totara-specific features such as the popup dialog boxes. They will be plain, but they should be functional.

As for the totara menu, the code that generates it is stored in a file called local/totara_menu.php, which is included by the header.html and footer.html files in the theme. The totara_menu.php file just defines the structure so it should be easy to apply your own styles to it to change it's appearance.

Hope that helps,

Simon