Attendees:

• George Babey
• Bill Filler (Deactivated)
• Douglas Hall (Deactivated)
• Dave Ormsbee
• Ari Rizzitano (Deactivated)
• Matt Tuchfarber (Deactivated)

Goals:

1. Record White Label's needs, plans, and pain points around theming.
2. 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
  • Or administrative tools
• 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.