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