Just wanted to give everyone some advanced notification of some changes to themes that will be arriving in 2.6.

 

In 2.6 we are planning to switch Totara's default theme from 'Standard Totara' to 'Standard Totara Responsive'. The responsive theme is currently available in 2.5 and is based off 'bootstrapbase', moodle's responsive base theme.

 

Currently the theme hierarchy looks like this:

• Base
  • Standard
    • Standard Totara (default)
      • Custom Totara
      • Kiwifruit
• Bootstrap Base
  • Standard Totara Responsive

In 2.6 we are planning to change it to this:

• Base
  • Standard
    • Standard Totara (deprecated)
      • Custom Totara (deprecated)
      • Kiwifruit
• Bootstrap Base
  • Standard Totara Responsive (default)
    • Custom Totara Responsive

 

"Deprecated" means that the theme won't be available in the theme selector, but the code will still be in the theme folder and it can be used as a parent for another theme.

 

Essentially this means we're migrating standardtotara and customtotara to be responsive themes, but leaving kiwifruit as it is for now. We plan to make kiwifruit responsive for 2.7 and remove the non-responsive/deprecated themes entirely.

 

For sites that use standardtotara or customtotara you should just be able to switch to the responsive version in 2.6.

 

For sites that have custom themes with either standardtotara or customtotara as parents you won't have to do anything immediately, but at some point you should change the parents setting in your theme config.php from:

 

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

 

to:

 

$THEME->parents = array('standardtotararesponsive', 'bootstrapbase');

 

This is likely to result in some theme issues that will require updates to your theme so it's worth doing a thorough review of the theme after updating. The benefit is that your theme will then work much better on mobile devices.

 

Simon