Spoiled by a WYSIWYG World

Today I've been playing with Moodle. I think my school is going to get it, and I downloaded it to my machine here at home to start playing around with it to get a feel for it since it seems it can do everything but make coffee for you in the morning. I've been at it now for about eight straight hours, and my eyes feel grainy and hot, as though they might explode. It's been a long, long time since I've spent this long in front of a computer and accomplished this little.

I feel like I used to back in the old days when I built my very first webpage and I had to write the HTML by hand. It's been TOO long since I did that, and too much has changed. I am spoiled by WYSIWYG editors, and I desperately wish that some enterprising soul would craft one for Moodle. GOD, how I wish there were one out there for it. It took me the better part of two hours just to change the background color, the text color, and get a logo up on the test page I'm running here at home because I had to locate all the files, look up all the stupid codes for the colors, scan through the massive coding on the color file to find the fragment that codes for the background and text, resize, relabel, and relocate the logo, and rewrite the code that tells it where to look for the logo. When I finally loaded the main page and the background was a sort of turquoisish blue with the little reading cat in the corner, I wanted to cry with happiness. This is coming from someone who can put together an entire "web universe" on something like Google in an afternoon....

I don't see how people do this all day long. Don't they just want to fling themselves out windows? Granted, I know that people who do this professionally know how to do this much more efficiently than I, and they probably don't have to stumble around with the ineptitude that I did, but I very much missed the visual element of what I was trying to do. I think Moodle would become a great deal more user-friendly than it currently is if someone would just do that one little thing for it. Why can't someone help it be visually appealing? And I don't mean by that charging an arm and a leg for a professionally-made theme, BTW....

However, since it's a creature of open source, I'm sure nobody cares. It seems that open source stuff seldom gets the user-friendly touches. The people who craft it always rather seem to expect you to get "hard core" or get out, and making things visually appealing is always low on the agenda. Right now, I really don't know what to think about this experience. I don't really have the time to get "hard core," and apparently I'm not hard core enough right now to make it look the way I want to. I can make it do most of what I want to functionally, but it looks just awful.