Attendees:
Tactical Issues: Hawthorn
Q: Some small things are going to change/break, where should we document and by when?
A: Make sure Hawthorn page is updated to point to people still here. Pull request against documentation that would have to change.
Cale: It should be on edx-platform's docs and build to RTD (half of it already is). Cale thinks this should live in edx-platform instead of a separate repo.
(We're punting on this for now, though we'll make tickets for the documentation.)
Longer Term: Making Themes Better
Q: How was the community involved for Comprehensive Theming development?
Ned: How we got Comprehensive Theming
- We had nothing in edx-platform
- Stanford did the simplest possible thing that could work ("if statements") – Stanford Theming
- Two efforts were happening
- Structured (Design perspective): Here are things that you can change, here are all the things you should not change.
- Idea was to create a stable theming API.
- It was taking a long time.
- Freeform (Tech perspective): What's the simple thing we could do to let people change the front end? Make arbitrary overrides.
- Fast to build
- Gave people a better way to do theming than they had
- This is "Comprehensive Theming"
- Not clear there was a requirements gathering process.
- We've had PRs where folks have extracted small files from larger ones so that they can be overridden in a more modular way.
Q: What's the right way to engage the community?
A:
- Mailing List
- Slack
- edXchange board
- It's not clear if this board is accessible at this time.
- Reboot of Open edX remote meetup?
- Check GitHub for who has themes written.
- Special Interest Group around Front End
- FedX notes are already on Confluence
- Monthly hangout like the devops configuration model?
- This requires a lot of coordination effort on our part.
Q: What are known pain points?
A:
- Can't override underscore templates.
- Slow compilation/test cycle.
- Unclear documentation.
- No stable API – things shift around from release to release.
- Three versions of CSS floating around.
- Large files to override.
- We don't know what we can delete.
- edx.org has no stake in getting theming right, difficult to resource large scale changes – but that might change with rebranding project
- All new branding stuff should be in a theme.
Ways people want to theme
- Style: We want to get folks using Bootstrap for CSS Theming – better defined, well understood by a large community.
- Structural changes: Continue this, but make no release-to-release promises. Better tooling to flag changes that were made? We should gather requirements here.
- Text changes: ("certificate" example for Stanford)
- Logo
Q: How does Comprehensive Theming work with our shift to React components?
- Ned: Ideally, we'd have a technical design to better separate our concerns from theirs and give stability. Not sure what that would look like.
- For text replacement, look at what Studio Front End does.
- Make Comprehensive Theming and Webpack work together?
- Do we really have to right now?
Next Steps