Martin Dougiamas recently posted about the future of themes in Moodle and for Moodle 2.7.
The first interesting thing is that the Clean theme is going to be the default theme for Moodle. This is the Bootstrap 2 base theme that was added into Moodle 2.6. The development and addition of this theme in core was one of the great outcomes from the Moodle developer hackfest at the Moodlemoot in Dublin last year. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this years hackfest in Edinburgh.
I believe that HQ moving to this theme as the default theme moves Moodle to where it is not just “mobile as well”, but mobile first in interface development which is a great thing for the community. A responsive interface by default means that theme developers and institutions, and plugin developers can take advantage of this in the future. The fact that all code in Moodle will be tested using this theme now going forward is also a great decision.
He also announced that they will include a new Bootstrap 2 based theme called MORE that contains a lot of settings for customising the theme from within the user interface theme settings. This means that those without the development skills or even the desire to develop a theme from scratch can just tweak the MORE theme colour settings and so on to get a branded theme. This will help those organisations without the budget to do more complex solutions still get a smart-looking theme. This is going to benefit the majority of smaller Moodle sites out there.
The third point he mentioned is that the standard-based themes are being remove from core and will become plugins in the Moodle plugins directory so that people who use them can still use them. Although I understand the reasoning behind this, it will come as a small roadbump to some who are still using them and are mid-way through projects to upgrade this summer and not planned to go to clean. I foresee a lot of requests to build custom bootstrap2 based themes in the coming months – which isn’t a bad thing either.
One potentially contentious point for some developers is that there is no current plans to put Bootstrap 3 in core Moodle for the time being. I think this is a good move although I love the Bootstrap 3 themes I have seen. With the migration to a new base theme, what is needed is stability of the base development level.
See here For Martin Dougiamas post on themes
Just to be very clear, Standard-based themes will continue to work fine if you upgrade to Moodle 2.7.
If you have a custom Standards-based theme you won’t notice any change at all.
If you were using one of the ones that were included in core then you might have to download it and install it separately (however in this case we’d encourage you to try the More theme instead (or one of the many Bootstrap-based themes in moodle.org/plugins to get a better theme for your users).