Attendees:

Goals:

Record White Label's needs, plans, and pain points around theming.
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:
- 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.

2018-03-06 Theming Meeting (FedX Core + Business)

Attendees:

Goals:

Requirements

Plans

How will Bootstrap Transition Affect White Label?