Thanks very much to Remote Learner Canada, especially Hubert Chathi and Olav Jordan, for their work on the bulk of this code, and also Mike Churchward for supporting them. I worked on it after that (actually simplified it by removing a feature temporarily: multiple pages) to bring it more to what I was imagining, and to provide a base to build on and get all the navigation perfect.
There's still work to do. Some blocks don't quite work as expected, and some of the code still needs upgrading to bring it fully into line with 2.0. We also could use a much better course overview block and better CSS styling of the profile pages. But it's definitely more usable this it was, I think.
As requested and voted on admin can now choose not to include course categories within the navbar and global navigation block.
At the same time I also introduced a second setting, showallcourses, which ensures all of the courses a user is registered in are shown on the navigation at all times.
This is part of http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Theme_engines_for_Moodle%3F
$THEME is now initialised at the same time as $OUTPUT. Old functions like
theme_setup are deprecated in favour of methods on $PAGE. There is a new
theme_config class in outputlib.php that deals with loading the theme config.php file.
CSS used to be served by themes styles.php files calling a function in weblib.php.
Now it works by each theme's styles.php file doing
$themename = basename(dirname(__FILE__));
require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../theme/styles.php');
which is less code to be copied into each theme. (Old-style styles.php files still
work thanks to some code in deprecatedlib.php.)
Admin UI for choosing a theme cleaned up.
A couple of theme-specific hard-coded hacks like $THEME->cssconstants and
$THEME->CSSEdit have been replaced by a more generic $THEME->customcssoutputfunction
hook. See examples at the end of outputlib.php
Also:
* Fix setting the theme in the URL, which seems to have been broken since 1.9.
* Fix up errors on a few pages caused by the new initialisation order.
* MDL-19097 moodle_page::set_course should not set $COURSE unless it is $PAGE.
* httpsrequired() from moodlelib.php moved to $PAGE->https_required().
* Move has_started() method to the renderer base class.
* Further fixes to display of early errors.
* Remove print_header/footer_old from weblib. I did not mean to commit them before.
Sam Hemelryk