Format

We had perhaps 20-30 people in attendance.  We went around the room with each person talking about:

1. The ways in which their company "themes" edX

2. Any particular pain points they experience.

I attempted to record everything that was said as a series of bullet points for each person.  To get the following lists, I then bucketed those bullet points roughly by the sub-type of "theming" that they seem to represent.  (I didn't think too hard about which bucket things belong in; deciding how each of these should be handled is its own exercise.)  

Some Takeaways

• The big one is that people keep trying to do things that would better be handled by a third-party CMS.

• Branding is obviously very prevalent, but:

  • Sometimes it gets used to do things that should probably be configuration.

  • Getting consistent styling between Open edX and third-party pages is hard.

• Using the server-side configuration/flags sounds difficult.

• i18n not fully solved

• Not too much talk about comprehensive theming - "Make the common things easy, make the uncommon things possible."

Branding

• Visual tweaks

• Branding / SASS

• SASS variable overrides

• Cosmetics

• Hiding things purely with CSS

• colors and fonts

• styling changes

• font changes

• Modifying stylesheets at runtime

• Certificate branding

• consistent branding between open edX/other things

• Styling consistency with custom pages and platform pages

• REM size difference issues

• Multi-tenancy branding

Configuration

• Have things defaulted off

• discovery of configuration settings is hard

• Django admin for waffle flags: table is empty

• Want config by site

• Remove stuff from UI

• what params exist in python/waffle?

• favicon in studio

• header changes

• Modify blocks via site configuration

• Themes based on ansible variables (logo, CSS, images)

• Settings/site configuration unclear

• Multi-tenancy hiding/showing elements

• Marketing URLs and marketing URLs linkmap (?)

Customization

• Hooks to modify things in base files

• Hooks in templates at places they're needed

• Overriding headers / footers

• Course page overrides

• Course catalog layout overrides (sections)

• Customizations should generally be configurations

i18n

• i18n

• localization

• Semantic strings as i18n keys, not english strings (fixed in MFEs)

• Intl for custom code / new content pages

• multi-lingual

Plugins

• Want program manager to experiment without working with a developer

• System to let users inject stuff

• Template changes, want info from context: date, user, etc.

CMS

• Wordpress

• Wordpress/CMS

• CMS

• landing pages

• Theming home page

• Terms of service x3