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[Proposal] Make Indigo the default Open edX Theme

[Proposal] Make Indigo the default Open edX Theme

Owned by Feanil Patel
Last updated: Jan 20, 2025 by Ali Hugo
2 min read

Overview

Make the Indigo Theme the default visual theme for the Open edX Platform.

 

Problem

Currently the Open edX project maintains a set of default styles and colors that are not the default for tutor.  Tutor then overrides these with forks of various branding packages and the Indigo base theme.  This leads to the maintenance of two themes where we only really need one default and it results in double work and confusion for anyone who might need to modify the theme further.  For example, there have been many cases where we have tested and designed new features using the default Open edX theme and would only find out that they did not work as expected when we examine the sandboxes for the next named release, a time lag of weeks to months after the initial work had been completed.

 

Use Cases

  • As an operator I want to know and modify the current default values for various sass and django templates.

  • As a developer I want to update visuals or layout for the Open edX Platform experience.  

    • You might think the change is to update the default theme in edx-platform but the change is in fact in a tutor brand/theme repo.

 

Proposed Solution/Implementation Plan

  1. Perform an a11y assessment and public UI/UX testing of the theme.

  2. Correct any issues that are found.

  3. Merge upstream changes from the tutor forked header/footer/brand into the openedx core repos.

  4. Merge the Indigo theme into the edx-platform repo so that it lives in the core system.

  5. Deprecate the current default theme and replace it with Indigo as the new default.

  6. Update figma base artifacts so that they are using the Indigo theme defaults

 

Long term Maintenance/Ownership

This should reduce the long term ownership burden of the theming resources for the Open edX platform.  The resources currently dedicated to maintaining and improving the indigo theme would put their energy towards helping maintain and improve the new default theme (Indigo) as a part of the Open edX community.  This set of resources would not be able to handle all maintenance and design work but should be able to help with routine maintenance and result in us not splitting our resources between themes.

 

Other Considerations

Accessibility

I’m not currently sure about the accessibility compliance of the Tutor Indigo theme, before it became the default, we would need to do this assessment and correct any issues that prevent the theme from being compliant with WCAG 2.2 AA compliance.

 

Relevant Links