Report back on OpenCraft's MFE theming discovery

[arbrandes]

Start March 9th and (possibly) ending March 22nd, OpenCraft will embark on a discovery of how MFE's can be themed. Report results back to the group.

For reference, OEROADMAP-13 was the original proposal by @bradenmacdonald.

[arbrandes]

@xitij2000, mind if I add you as assignee, here? Mostly to make comms easier.

[xitij2000]

@arbrandes Sure, go ahead.

[arbrandes]

@xitij2000, do you think you could make the discovery public and and link to it here once it's done?

[xitij2000]

@arbrandes Certainly!

[antoviaque]

Here is the link to the forum thread announcing the results: https://discuss.openedx.org/t/open-edx-branding-and-theming-improvements/4747

And the discovery results themselves, which are open to comments: https://gitlab.com/opencraft/dev/branding-and-theming/-/merge_requests/1

CC @xitij2000

[antoviaque]

@xitij2000 I believe this ticket is done, so I'm closing it.

There will likely be more updates & feedback gathering as things move forward though, so I've created a ticket about the theming work: #42

I'm also adding an item to the contributors meeting agenda, to remember to discuss progress regularly. Would you be able to join the meeting from time to time, to give those regular updates? It doesn't need to be every two weeks though - what frequency would work for you? And would you be able to come to the next one? See #41

[xitij2000]

I'm also adding an item to the contributors meeting agenda, to remember to discuss progress regularly. Would you be able to join the meeting from time to time, to give those regular updates? It doesn't need to be every two weeks though - what frequency would work for you? And would you be able to come to the next one? See #41

Sure, I can join, but I don't think I'll have any updates for the next meeting, since work on this is paused to make space of BD-38.

[antoviaque]

@xitij2000 OK, let's keep it for a later meeting then, when there is something to update about. When do you think that will be?

[antoviaque]

@xitij2000 Was there an update posted somewhere on this at the end? If so, we could link to it from here, and close this ticket.

[xitij2000]

While there was an initial discovery and we updated it based on the changes in the ecosystem, such as the use of tutor and movement of theming towards design tokens. The task for the theming MFE was eventually dropped.

While it is a worthwhile endeavour, the original plan was to use it as a way for our Ocim clients to set up their own instance and theme using a simple UI, and we no longer offer that service, so we no longer have an internal need for it.

At this point, we're focussing on having CI pipelines that can help automate quick deployment of themes so that quick variable changes can be automatically deployed and pushed to production without rebuilding all the MFEs, using design tokens.

As such, this ticket can be closed since there is currently no additional work to expect in this area.

[antoviaque]

@xitij2000 Thanks for the update! So the way to theme MFEs going forward is through variables - is this already applicable to all MFEs?

[xitij2000]

@xitij2000 Thanks for the update! So the way to theme MFEs going forward is through variables - is this already applicable to all MFEs?

This is still WIP in an alpha branch of Paragon, however, it is the new mechanism for styling MFEs. Currently, the mechanism we use is to inject variables into simple-theme using Grove (earlier Ocim) that is built and installed into edx-platform and MFEs. The new mechanism makes it possible to override variables in a better way using design tokens, and there is also WIP mechanism to do this dynamically, making it unnecessary to rebuild the MFEs for each theme change.

I have a WIP version of simple-theme that uses design tokens that I will keep updated as design tokens evolve, and we can merge it when design tokens are fully released.

[antoviaque]

Thanks @xitij2000 - sounds good. 👍