Topics

• Questions about frontend-platform and edx-platform (AJ and David Joy)

  • Background

    • frontend-platform contains logging, i18n, etc.

    • only used in MFEs

      • (we’ve decided in the past that frontend-platform shouldn’t be anywhere except MFEs)

    • AJ ran into trouble trying to write new frontend code in edx-platform

      • tried to pull frontend-platform into edx-platform

    • options were:

      • duping code

        • Treat as a temporary hack/tech debt and update later when the page becomes an MFE

      • making frontend-platform a dep of edx-platform

      • iframe in your new code into edx-platform

      • Extract service implementations from frontend-platform to be used directly

      • just saying “sorry, you need to make an MFE”

    •  

• Pull Request templates: good? bad? how to make them work?

  • Often 90% of the template doesn’t apply

  • Many people don’t edit the template at all, which ends up worse than having the description empty

  • It’s possible to have a check fail and block merging unless the PR description meets certain criteria, example: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/issue-pull-request-body-regex-validator

  • Much of this is down to organizational culture, OpenCraft has a template they use consistently and Braden & others get people to comply

  • What kind of templates are useful?

    • Checklist of “did you do these important things that are often forgotten?”

    • Guidance on “did you include this important information about this change?”

• Branding: How can we keep branded edX Strings separate from the open source code (right now English string values are also edX-branded string values)

  • We’ll want to change wording in many places to match our branding, but only on edx.org

  • How do we do this in a way that plays nicely with our code, frameworks, and i18n tooling/community?

  • Where would the override strings live?

  • Will this get even harder if we want to change layout, add widgets, etc.?

  • Isn’t this what the community has wanted from theming for ages, and now it’s our problem also?

  • It’s possible to merge po files such that one takes priority, which could handle some cases: https://stackoverflow.com/a/1894071 (use a translation file to replace the text in the open source code with our branded text)

Backlog of Questions/Discussions

• React - Discussions Forum - editor input - draft JS

• Shopping cart deprecation with Diana

  • lessons learned, knowledge sharing on dead code, etc.