Attendees:
Goals:
- Record White Label's needs, plans, and pain points around theming.
- Find areas we can work together to push work forward.
Requirements
- #1 priority: Branding aspects
- Logos
- Styles
- This is the majority of what the themes do.
- #2 priority (might go away in the future)
- Some layouts are overridden via template override mechanism
- In majority of cases, because base pages were not responsive. If they were responsive, it might all go away.
- These template tweaks are similar across the different white label sites.
- Why was this not originally merged in? Why in a theme?
- Wanted to work quickly, didn't want to impact community.
- We should be able to port some of this into edx-platform proper.
- Some client specific stuff, also we still have "fake program" stuff in there (before we had programs).
- Strategically, believe we should pull all the marketing stuff out, not push the theme templates back in.
- Customize some of the information on the marketing pages. ← "Text theming"
- What we really need there is a CMS.
- Would take away half the Arbisoft tickets "Hey, MIT needs this piece of text changed."
- Enterprise portal work – might pull some of the White Label stuff over here.
- (no doc on this yet, but add when it's available)
- "Everything that the user sees before they get into the course."
- Would be good if the community could also use this.
- We only have a few white label sites with custom themes:
- edx.org
- edge
- MITx Pro
- HMS Global Academy
- Wharton Prof Ed.
- Functional overrides
- E-commerce override to add quanitity to the basket (bulk purchase) – this will move into the ecommerce repo as a feature.
- Backend was implemented there, but FE was WL only.
- Faster to implement in the theme, but Product coordination would have been beneficial here.
- Other examples where functionality possibly incorrectly added at themeing layer
- Data sharing consent – didn't have time to modify the model.
- Actual consent is stored in the database, but moving towards putting the text of consent in DB on a per-client basis.
- "Django Admin as CMS"
- Not clear if CMS is the solution.
- Things that weren't site aware, but should have been (CT is "a huge crutch, and we use it")
- May have Enterprise-specific cases where we want to control their navigation
- Nobody cares about theming Studio today. Maybe someday when courses are being created by their employees. Today, we're selling the content of edX.
- Think of theming and layout customization as separate things.
- Community: Build Your Own Frontend
- Replacement for Comprehensive Theming?
- Third parties could fork and truly customize
- Ari: Huge project, will want to involve open source providers if they're going down this route.
- Bill: We should try to help make upgrades easier, versioned APIs, etc.
- Haven't touched courseware.
- Overrides on dashboard, registration.
- course certificate overrides are stored in the database
- program certs were built with theming in mind
- Pain points
- Theming's been mostly stable
- It's also mostly worked on by Arbisoft
- We usually make it work in platform, so it doesn't need to be overridden
- When something changes in platform and breaks something in a theme (checkbox in registration – showed up in WL sites, had to be disabled).
- Deployment process
- To change a few colors, we have to go through the whole deployment process.
- We don't do this often, but it shouldn't rely on the whole platform being deployed.
- Recently merged a couple of OpenCraft PRs to allow overrides of blocks of a template instead of whole file.
- We have this functionality, but we haven't retrofitted this into our existing themes.
Dave's shameless plug for Volunteers for giving an Open edX Workshop on Theming: Bill Filler (Deactivated) has to check his calendar
Plans
- Stories on backlog to clean up existing themes, responsive header/footer, more base pages are responsive now.
- No incremental functionality improvements planned in the short/medium term.
- New Portal Site
- Starting work ("writing code") next quarter, though that's pretty soon
- UX and Product has been thinking about this
- UX is making mocks
- Engineering is off looking at what APIs are going to be required to support this
- "Logistration" is a part of this effort
- Only Business Team is building this. Want to be able to experiment, but also eventually leverage this into the rest of the org.
- First rev of this would not change the browsing experience for edx.org itself, but may eventually be used for this.
- Haven't decided what's MVP/v1.
- Want to make sure we don't isolate learners, let them see the edx.org courses as well.
- For now, thought is that everyone's still in the same LMS. How to offboard/convert enterprise customers to edx.org customers.
- CMS functionality
- New stuff, so Bootstrap, Paragon, React, etc.
- Other challenges
- We shopped around the Logistration stuff, but we didn't end up implementing it.
- Want to have a clear plan before we go to everyone about it.
How will Bootstrap Transition Affect White Label?
- A lot of this is using Pattern Library
- Harry and Andy did some work here to allow Bootstrap vars to propogate to v1 and v2 CSS.
- Program marketing page is the only page using Bootstrap at the moment.
- To see if it's going to break:
- Test via the the theming admin: Testing WL themes in devstack
- Arbisoft just finished work to allow white label testing on sandbox (checkbox in config)
- Set up WL on your local machine.
- Devops working on devstack with white label sites.
- When we know it's going to break:
- Need to coordinate the effort. Andy and Harry would get the themes to a mostly working state, run past WL team for review and iteration.