Due to this specification being retired, we will be discontinuing active development of our Pressbooks LTI Provider plugin and archiving the repository. Like other plugins and themes that we have previously archived, this repository will remain publicly available in read-only mode, though we will be unable to provide support for users who wish to maintain or extend the project.

For our enterprise Pressbooks clients, we have developed and maintain an IMS Global certified replacement plugin, which supports the LTI 1.3 specification as well as the Assignment and Grade Services extension. We call this product 'Pressbooks Results for LMS'. It is currently available as an optional add-on for our enterprise clients. For more information, please contact our sales team directly.

Because the tool we use to generate MOBI files is no longer supported, and Amazon suggests delivering EPUBs into their ecosystem, we have decided to remove support for MOBI exports from the Pressbooks platform in a forthcoming release.

Going forward, our flowable ebook export efforts will focus exclusively on the EPUB format. Users who still wish to produce MOBI files for personal use will be encouraged to generate these files using Pressbooks EPUB exports and freely available desktop applications like Kindle Previewer or Calibre.

If you're interested in tracking the progress of this task, please see this GitHub issue: https://github.com/pressbooks/pressbooks/issues/2193

The monthly "open source calls" we previously held on the first Monday of each month are being replaced by a monthly "product update webinar." These product update meetings will be held from 2-3pm ET on the last Thursday of each month; the first of them will be this Thursday, March 26. These meetings have a running agenda which includes the Zoom link. A recurring event for these meetings has been published to Google Calendar.

Meetings will include a demonstration of recent improvements we've released and overview of projects that we're currently working on. We’ll also leave conversation space for attendees to share news and updates about local development projects of interest, and to provide input on your Pressbooks-related product needs and desires.

The March 26 webinar will include an update on recent progress we've made on two long-awaited projects: 1) a searchable, filterable directory of public books across all known Pressbooks networks and 2) updates to our LTI provider plugin to make it compatible with the new 1.3 specification and add support for grade passback to the Learning Management System.

Hope to see you later this week!

A less enlightened developer might have just laughed out loud and said 'Too bad! We can't have amateurs ruining our beautiful books with their questionable typography choices, now can we?' Luckily for me, I work with people (like Taylor McGrath) who believe that the best designers and developers listen to and respond to their users. And for some time now, Taylor and others on our support team have heard from users who'd like to have more control over typography and font choices when theming their books.

Enter what we're calling 'Shape Shifter': a nerdy code name for theme options that allows book administrators to choose typefaces from a curated list of open fonts for Headers and Body text. These font selector options are designed to function separately for webbooks, PDF exports, and ebooks so that users could for example choose to use Alegreya (a serif typeface) for the body text in PDF exports and Barlow (a sans serif typeface) for the body text in the webook.

In the current sprint, we added the code to do this in Pressbooks and McLuhan. Next week, we're rolling out the fully-baked feature for our EDU customers in a new premium theme called Malala, where we'll test and get user feedback before deciding whether to add these theme options to other of our themes. Open source users get ... this blog post!

Developers who want to take advantage of this feature need to convert their Global Typography SCSS.

Here's how it could be done for Clarke, one of our existing open-source book themes.

Before:

@import "font-stack-web";
$serif-web: serif !default;
$sans-serif-web: sans-serif !default;

$font-1: "Times New Roman", Georgia, $serif-web;
$font-2: Helvetica, Arial, $sans-serif-web;
$font-3: $font-2;

After:

// Load dynamically generated Global Typography fonts
@import "font-stack-web";
$serif-web: serif !default;
$sans-serif-web: sans-serif !default;

// Load Shape Shifter fonts, if any.
@import "shapeshifter-font-stack-web";
$shapeshifter-font-1-is-serif: true !default;
$shapeshifter-font-2-is-serif: true !default;

// Insert custom fonts for your theme into the font stacks below. Always end the
// stack with $serif-web or $sans-serif-web, as appropriate—this allows custom
// language support to be added dynamically.

@if variable-exists(shapeshifter-font-1) {
  $font-1: $shapeshifter-font-1, if($shapeshifter-font-1-is-serif, $serif-web, $sans-serif-web);
} @else {
  $font-1: "Times New Roman", Georgia, $serif-web;
}
@if variable-exists(shapeshifter-font-2) {
  $font-2: $shapeshifter-font-2, if($shapeshifter-font-2-is-serif, $serif-web, $sans-serif-web);
} @else {
  $font-2: Helvetica, Arial, $sans-serif-web;
}
$font-3: $font-2;

Make changes like the above to:

• assets/styles/epub/_fonts.scss
• assets/styles/epub/_fonts.scss
• assets/styles/prince/_fonts.scss

Pay special attention to variable names (replace $sans-serif-web to $sans-serif-epub or $sans-serif-prince, for example) If you have @import statements move them from the bottom of the file into the else conditions.

To finish, add this code snippet in your theme's functions.php file:

add_filter('pb_is_shape_shifter_compatible', '__return_true');

Once activated, the theme should have new Theme Options for each format:

"90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace"

On January 1, 2018, Pressbooks software was the following:

1. Pressbooks (our core plugin): version 4.5.0
2. Pressbooks default book theme: pressbooks-book 1.12.0 [Luther]
3. Pressbooks root theme: Pressbooks Publisher 3.1.3
4. A handful of smaller plugins, including Pressbooks Stats 1.4.0 and DocRaptor for Pressbooks 2.1.0

Over the course of the year we made major updates to each piece of our core product and introduced several new tools and plugins. The most significant new releases were our new Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) provider and single sign-on (SSO) plugins, designed to help educational institutions connect their Pressbooks networks with their Learning Management Systems and enterprise login systems, and Buckram, a set of style components that makes book theming easier and more powerful.

In 2018, we also made it easier for anyone who wants to get a more granular look at planned releases and ongoing development work by creating and maintaining GitHub project boards for the project in general and for versioned releases of specific components like Pressbooks, pressbooks-book (McLuhan/Buckram), Aldine, and Pressbooks LTI Provider. These project boards are regularly updated by our dev team to include reference information about planned and completed releases.

We’re enormously grateful to the various institutions who funded different parts of this work and for their shared interest in contributing back to an open source product that benefits the entire community of users. eCampusOntario, Ryerson University, Rutgers University Libraries and Bay Path University each made significant contributions to our 2018 development work, and Brad Payne and Alex Paredes from BCcampus contributed code to two big new features that were added to our core product this year. Thank you, all!

Pressbooks

Our core product is Pressbooks, a WordPress plugin that transforms a WordPress multisite into a powerful book publishing system that makes accessible webbooks and several types of exports, including ebooks, print-ready PDFs, and various XML flavors.

In 2018 we brought out 25 minor releases and 7 major releases of core Pressbooks (beginning with Pressbooks 5.0.0 in late February, running all the way up to Pressbooks 5.6.0, released in November). The last version of Pressbooks to be released in 2018 was 5.6.3, which came out on December 12. All told Pressbooks received a net addition of more than 16,000 lines of code from humans in 2018, with ~10,000 coming from Dac (across 161 commits), ~5,000 from Ned (across 322 commits), ~1,600 from BCcampus’ Brad Payne (across 8 commits), and ~100 from Lukas Kaiser (across 3 commits).

So those are the raw numbers. But what do they mean? How did Pressbooks improve over the last year? Well, in lots of ways. The obsessive among you are welcome to view a detailed changelog for a more exhaustive record of everything we shipped this past year, but the following list is a baker’s dozen of our favorite improvements from the past year:

• Major overhaul to the ‘Organize’ page: We improved the page’s accessibility for keyboard navigation and screen reader users and its usability when displayed on mobile devices. We made it easier to manage the visibility of content across web and exports; all content now has two binary options: “Show in Web” and “Show in Exports.” We also added book navigation options to the edit screen.

• Import & Export improvements: We added support for importing individual chapters from Pressbooks webbooks and for importing all supported file types from local and web-based sources. We added graceful fallbacks for interactive content that can’t be fully experienced in ebook and PDF exports. We enabled the inclusion of TablePress tables in eBook and PDF exports. We allowed users to produce HTMLBook exports, made our XHTML and HTMLBook outputs cleaner and more readable, and added a link to the diagnostics page which lets users to preview and debug PDF export issues directly in their browser using the XHTML source preview without having to repeatedly generate PDF exports.

• Cloning improvements: We also built on the book cloning feature (funded by Ryerson University) and the chapter-cloning feature (funded by eCampus Ontario) with a whole raft of cloning improvements, like adding a book source URL to Book Info for cloned books; allowing users to specify a new title for cloned books at the time of cloning; adding a theme option to let readers compare a clone book to its source; and adding cloning support for media attachments, media metadata (including attribution statements), and glossary terms.

• Glossary tool: We added a native glossary tool that allows authors to provide rollover and clickable definitions for glossary terms and to auto-generate a glossary list as a back matter type in their books. We’re very grateful to Brad Payne and Alex Paredes of BCcampus for contributing the first version of this feature.

• Shortcodes for authors: Thanks to support from Bay Path University, we added more than a dozen new shortcodes that work in both the visual editor and in document imports. These shortcodes make it easier for authors to include well-structured HTML elements without having to learn HTML.

• Interactive and other third party content: We added support for interactive content (like H5P activities, PhET simulations, Open Embeddable Assessments, Knight Lab timelines, and eduMedia interactives). We made it so that iframes embedded from trusted sources were automatically converted to shortcodes rather than being stripped and deleted. We also disabled the display of related videos in YouTube OEmbeds once videos are finished playing.

• Cover generator tool: We made our self-service cover generator tool part of our core plugin, making it available to open-source users. This tool makes it easier for authors to make attractive print-ready covers for their books.

• LaTeX and Mathematical Notation: We made it easier for users to use mathematical notation by improving support for WP QuickLaTeX, adding support for QuickLaTeX rendering within TablePress tables, and permitting the use of TablePress tables and SVG files in ebook formats.

• Centralized contributor management: We made it much easier for book admins to manage and display authors, editors, translators, reviewers, illustrators, and generic contributors to books. We also moved contributor management from the “Organize” menu to a more logical place under the “Book Info” menu in the dashboard.

• Better Textboxes: We improved the markup and display options for educational textboxes (learning objectives, key takeaways, exercises, examples) and added a new “sidebar” textbox that’s especially helpful for textbook content.

• Licensing and Attribution Improvements: We moved license types into a taxonomy and now differentiate between the CC0 license and public domain work. Pressbooks now allows users to add and display image attribution metadata, making it easier to properly credit CC and other openly licensed images when they’re reused in book (big thanks to Brad and Alex from BCcampus for their work on this feature).

• GDPR Compliance: We added support for WordPress 4.9.6 privacy policy management to help Pressbooks networks comply with the new requirements of The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a regulation on privacy and data protection now in effect throughout the European Union.

• More script and language support: We added support for the Devanagari script and several languages, including Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Telugu, making our software more inclusive of the millions of people who use this script or these languages.

Pressbooks Default Book Theme

At the start of 2018, the default book theme for all Pressbooks networks was Luther (also known as pressbooks-book 1.12.0 for any version heads out there). When we released Pressbooks 5.0.0 in late February 2018, it was accompanied by McLuhan, a new book theme. Upon its release as pressbooks-book 2.0.0, McLuhan replaced Luther as the default theme for all new books, and Luther subsequently became available as a separate, standalone legacy theme. The development of McLuhan was supported by eCampus Ontario, and the theme itself was designed with textbooks in mind, although it supports all kinds of content.

Since its initial appearance, McLuhan has seen more than a dozen additional releases and is now on version 2.6.1 (interested readers can consult the detailed changelog). All told the pressbook-book repo saw the net addition of more than 80,000 lines of code by humans, with ~78,000 coming from Ned (across 397 commits), ~3,000 from Daniel (across 59 commits), and ~200 from Dac (across 19 commits). Of the many improvements we made to the default book theme in 2018, here are some of the biggest highlights:

• • Support for new features: We added support in this theme for a number of new features now available in Pressbooks, including: an increased default webbook reading width and three new variable reading width options; collapsible sections; automatic resizing of webbook contents when the Hypothesis annotation pane is expended; optional lightbox for linked images; book and section Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs); glossary term lists; automatic graceful fallback for interactive content in ebook and PDF exports; and differentiated link styles for print and digital PDFs.
    • Accessibility improvements: Thanks to support from Ryerson University, we added a keyboard-accessible table of contents and customizable colours and logos (inherited from network settings). We also improved webbook accessibility by adding more context to webbook navigation, using better HTML5 markup for images, improving focus styles, and enhancing the markup for headings and our table of contents.
    • New theme options: Book admins now have several new theme options for customizing the appearance and functionality of their webbooks as well as eBook and PDF exports. These additional theme options are currently only available in the 8 themes we’ve converted to use Buckram (more on that later).
    • Better navigation: We made webbook navigation consistent on all screen sizes, allowed authors to customize part/chapter labels in the webbook display and in exports, and now display more descriptive labels and/or chapter short titles in previous/next nav links.
    • Table of Contents improvements: Books now indicate the current section in the dropdown ToC. We also added  "Show All"/"Hide All" buttons to the webbook ToC, and improved the appearance and overall functionality of ToC in all locations.
    • New features for cloned books: Cloned books include a reference and link back to their source and an optional comparison tool that lets you compare current versions of cloned and source texts.
    • LMS-specific theming: We also added settings which allow extraneous navigational elements to be suppressed when content is loaded via LTI within a Learning Management System (as these typically have their own internal navigation).

Pressbooks Root Theme

In late February, we replaced Pressbooks Publisher with a new Pressbooks root theme, called Aldine. Aldine’s creation was one of the major improvements supported by Ryerson University. Since its initial appearance, Aldine has seen an additional eight releases and is now on version 1.5.0 (interested readers can consult the changelog).

Aldine was designed to make customizing the look and feel of Pressbooks networks easier. It gives network managers tools to add institutional branding to a Pressbooks network by letting them globally change default colors, logos and contact information for a network, introduces a standalone catalog page which can be sorted, filtered, and searched by subject or license, and makes it much easier to create and display additional pages to the network root (like “About Us,” “Get Help,” “Terms of Service,” etc.).

Following its initial release, we’ve added specific buttons to the page editor to insert shortcodes for page sections and calls to action; added more customizer options; made it possible to edit the contact form email directly from the Customizer; and made privacy and anti-spamming improvements.

Other Plugins

We made a few minor updates to the small Pressbooks Stats plugin, with some bigger work planned for early 2019 (‘improving usage statistics at the network level’ refers to ongoing efforts to give network managers better tools for understanding how their networks are being used). The current version of Pressbooks Stats is now 1.6.2.

At the beginning of 2018, we also maintained a plugin which implemented a DocRaptor export module for Pressbooks as a drop-in replacement for PrinceXML. This standalone plugin was rolled into Pressbooks core with the release of Pressbooks 5.4.0 in July, and we are no longer maintaining the standalone plugin separately.

New Development

LTI Provider plugin

In May, we released a stable version of Pressbooks LTI Provider, thanks to support from Rutgers University Libraries. This plugin allows Pressbooks to act as an LTI provider, registering any number of LTI consumers, and supports both deep linking and the creation of Thin Common Cartridge exports with LTI links. LTI, which is short for Learning Tools Interoperability, is a specification maintained by IMS Global which allows third-party tools (like Pressbooks) to integrate with Learning Management Systems (like Canvas, Moodle, and Blackboard) in a standardized way. Using LTI makes it easier and more convenient for schools to securely plug learning tools and content into their LMS and make those tools and content feel native/seamless for learners.

In late 2017, while still employed at UW-Madison, I wrote in more detail about why I was so excited about using LTI to connect Pressbooks with LMSes. Much of what I wrote then still rings true for me today. In my opinion, our LTI Provider plugin is a hugely exciting feature for anyone interested in using Pressbooks content inside of a Learning Management System (a common desire for teachers, both in K-12 and higher ed settings). Our plugin is now on version 1.1.2, released in November (changelog). In Q1 2019, we plan to pursue official IMS Global certification against both the LTI and Thin Common Cartridge standards.

SSO plugins

In 2018 we also developed and released two plugins that enable single sign-on for common authentication systems used in higher education. These integrations allow log in to Pressbooks networks using using their institutional NetID and password as login credentials (authenticating through either CAS or SAML2).

• In May, we released the stable version of our SSO plugin for CAS (Central Authentication System). Our work on this plugin was funded by Rutgers University Libraries. This plugin is now on version 1.1.1.
• In late July, we also released the initial version of our SSO plugin for SAML2 (Shibboleth). This plugin is now on version 0.0.5.

These SSO plugins are now available on Gold PressbooksEDU networks with a one-time configuration fee.

Buckram

In April, our lead developer Ned Zimmerman published a helpful introduction to Pressbooks themes on our open source blog, and in July he did the same for Buckram, “a set of styled components for book theming, with corresponding markup, that can be customized with SASS variables,” which we released in an initial stable version that same month.

While it’s largely invisible to most end users, the work we did in 2018 to develop and release Buckram is important because it is provides the foundation for some really exciting theming and customization possibilities for Pressbooks. Buckram is what enabled all of the new theme options that we introduced in Clarke 2.0, for example. In 2018, we converted a batch of Pressbooks themes to use Buckram [Andreessen, Asimov, Jacobs, McLuhan, Andreesen, Dillard, Christie, and Baker], and development work on Buckram continues apace (it’s now at version 1.2.1), with many more theme conversions planned for 2019.

In the course of researching and writing this two part series, my already considerable esteem for my new Pressbooks colleagues grew enormously. I hope that you’ll agree that 2018 saw really significant improvements in Pressbooks as a software product and a community. If you want to know more about what we’ve got planned for the first few months of 2019, we’d invite you to take a look at our published Q1 roadmap and give us your feedback.

In a series of two posts I want to talk about what 2018 meant for Pressbooks, looking at both the software product and the human community that shapes and sustains that product. I’ll talk about the people first, well, because that’s how we try to do things.

The People

2018 was an exciting year for for Pressbooks and brought with it some pretty dramatic changes. Nothing makes this more obvious than a closer look at the people making and supporting Pressbooks. At the beginning of 2018, Pressbooks had two people working on the project full time (our developers Ned & Dac) and another four (Hugh, Liz, Zoe, Apurva) who split their time between Pressbooks and other projects. Throughout 2018, our team grew, matured, and specialized in response to the needs of our user communities.

Departures

In June, the Rebus Foundation (a non-profit organization founded by Pressbooks CEO Hugh McGuire), received a large Mellon Foundation grant to develop a web-based application for digital reading, research, annotations, and collections management. This change in Rebus’s fortunes meant that Zoe Wake Hyde and Apurva Ashok, two colleagues who had been splitting time between Rebus and Pressbooks, left Pressbooks to devote their energies full time to Rebus work. Midway through 2018, Pressbooks bid Zoe and Apurva a fond farewell. All of us working on Pressbooks continue to wish them well as they advance Rebus’s efforts to build a vibrant community of collaborators on open textbook projects; resources, best practices and software to support that community’s open publishing efforts; and a better scholarly reading ecosystem.

A growing Pressbooks team

Early in 2018, Pressbooks added three new team members: JC Guan, our first official product manager; Daniel Fernandes, who spent most of the year improving our existing web themes; and Phil Nelson, who had previously worked with Pressbooks as a contractor but began managing DevOps, systems administration, and infrastructure issues for our SaaS hosting offerings in a more formal capacity.

In 2018, Pressbooks also brought Liz Mays into a full-time role as our director of sales and marketing (she had previously been splitting her time between Rebus and Pressbooks) and welcomed Taylor McGrath to our team, first as an intern and later as a full-time communications and support specialist. Finally, in November, I joined the team as our first educational client manager, with a specific mandate to support our growing base of educational clients using Pressbooks as a platform for open education and open textbook initiatives.

Much of this change in staffing was undertaken in response to our growing base of educational clients and their desire to use Pressbooks networks to develop open educational resources in a variety of modalities and deliver them at no cost to students. While Pressbooks began as and remains an excellent tool for individual authors to self-publish their own books, we’ve been gratified to see our SaaS hosted platform for educational institutions (PressbooksEDU) become a popular choice for colleges and universities around the world who are interested in developing and publishing open educational resources. By the end of 2018, we were thrilled to be hosting standalone PressbooksEDU networks for more than forty colleges and universities in North America and Australia.

PressbooksEDU News

Along with growth in the number of educational institutions using Pressbooks to support their publishing initiatives and a corresponding growth in Pressbooks staff to support them, 2018 also saw invigoration of our PressbooksEDU news blog. Our EDU-focused blog averaged a new post every two weeks in 2018, focusing primarily on an audience of educational users and network managers of hosted EDU networks. Over the past year, Liz and Taylor used the blog to draw attention to educational uses for new Pressbooks features and provide a detailed glimpse into how Pressbooks has been used in OER publishing efforts undertaken by a retired professor, the University of Florida, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Ohio State University, the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Central Florida.

The story from 2018 that we’re most proud of at Pressbooks, though, was the announcement in March that A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students, a collaboratively-built resource edited by our very own Liz Mays, had won the 2018 Open Education Award for Excellence in the Open Textbook category from an international panel of judges at the Open Educational Consortium. A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students was originally published by Rebus Community using Pressbooks in August 2017 under the CC-BY 4.0 license, but continued to attract attention and praise throughout 2018.

We’ve got another series of case studies and feature updates planned for 2019, and are really excited to continue learning from and sharing the successes of our educational users. One of my biggest goals for 2019 will be establishing community resources and venues that meet the needs of network managers and our educational clients. Stay tuned for more news on this in the first half of 2019.

Support

No matter how easy to use its makers think a piece of software is, everyone who’s ever been involved in learning a new program will tell you that end users often need help and support. Pressbooks is no exception. While we work hard to make our software accessible and accompany it with clear technical documentation and helpful user guides, we still get a lot of support requests from our Pressbooks.com and PressbooksEDU offerings. In 2018, for example, Pressbooks staff received and responded to nearly 3,500 support requests. When it came to client support, Taylor, Liz, Apurva, and JC led the way in 2018, each resolving hundreds of support tickets.

In fact, most of the Pressbooks staffing changes in 2018 were made to ensure that we could continue to provide best-in-class support for our clients. To that end, Taylor overhauled and improved our Knowledge Base/FAQ documentation and Pressbooks user guide and published and now maintains a new guide explicitly for network managers. JC, Taylor and I also provided personalized training and support for dozens of network managers at client institutions throughout the year, a responsibility that I’m looking forward to continuing in 2019. In late November, Taylor and I also began offering regularly recorded webinars for our EDU clients highlighting how users can leverage new features to do more with Pressbooks; we held the first webinar in the series to accompany the release of Pressbooks 5.6.0.

Because I joined the team specifically to help educational clients succeed with their OER and other publishing efforts, my top priority for this year is to better understand the needs of our growing educational user base and to provide even more ways for PressbooksEDU network managers to engage with us, our software, and each other. Before making any specific plans, my first order of business is to conduct a thorough ‘listening tour’ of all of our existing educational clients so that I can better understand what their hopes, needs, and ambitions are. Over the next few months we will begin synthesizing responses and formulating new approaches and support tools that meet common needs.

Forum Improvements

Some of these changes are already underway in our open source and developer community. For example, in September 2018, we decided to close our open source Slack channel and focus our open source community efforts on the public Discourse forum, which we’ve been operating since early 2016. We now hold our monthly open source development calls (these are open to all!) in Zoom rather than Slack, and post regular public updates about development and upcoming calls on our open source blog and in the Development category of Discourse.

Our Discourse forum continued to flourish as a place for Pressbooks developers and other users to ask technical questions of each other. 2018 saw the addition of more than 60 new members, 340 new topics and 1,400 new posts, such that the forum now contains over 100 members, nearly 600 topics and almost 2,800 posts.

The most popular posts from 2018 in our community forum included a post Ned made about the developer’s guide to accompany the release of Pressbooks 5.0 and inquiries from Pressbooks users on topics ranging from importing content into Pressbooks, PrinceXML, iFrames and oEmbed customization, book theming, automatic line numbering, and watermarks and DocRaptor exports.

Working on an open source software project means that questions come in all the time on surprising topics and unexpected use cases. Observing and responding to these forum interactions over the last year helped us better understand our own software and its users, catch and fix bugs, and make more useful software. We’re grateful to everyone who engaged with us in 2018, and look forward to another year filled with rich, positive engagement with developers and other contributors.

Whether you’re an old hand or are new to Pressbooks and looking for a way to get involved in contributing to the open source project, we hope that you will feel welcomed and valued in our forum, and that you will treat others with kindness and respect. If you have any feedback for us on how we can make participating easier or more inclusive for you or others who might want to participate, please let us know by sending Ned and/or Steel a private message on the forum or by sending a Twitter DM to @pressbooksdev.

GitHub Ideas Forum

In March, our development team created a dedicated Ideas forum and connected Ideas board on GitHub for users to submit development ideas and suggestions for the Pressbooks team. Since then, we’ve received more than 150 unique ideas from almost 20 contributors (including the author of this post). We’ve already added several of these suggestions to our core product, with plans to address many more in 2019.

If you’ve got an idea for something that you think would make Pressbooks better in 2019, we encourage you to share it with us in this Ideas forum, which features a basic template asking you to provide a feature description, use case, and any other notes that might help us in evaluating or implementing your idea. If you’re new to GitHub, we recommend starting with this guide to submitting contributions to open source software projects or this guide to GitHub issues.

GitHub Snippets

A the same time we established the GitHub ideas forum, our dev team also created a GitHub repository to house useful code snippets for others working on/with Pressbooks. It’s currently a little-known and under-used resource, but we hope that by highlighting it here, interested community members might add useful snippets of their own more frequently in 2019.

At this point, I’m beginning to verge into product territory, so it’s probably a good stopping point for now. Keep an eye out for part two of our Pressbooks 2018: Year in Review, which will review highlights from our development work on Pressbooks software, in the near future.

• Rebuilding the Export page with progress indicators during exports, improved management of export files, and full keyboard accessibility
• Adding progress indicators to Clone and Import pages
• Adding ORCID support for contributors
• Improving support for books with editors or translators as primary contributors
• Adding support for cloning H5P content
• Adding metadata to webbooks to make it easier to cite them with Zotero
• Adding JSON-LD metadata to webbooks
• Adding a central database table of book metadata to Pressbooks networks to improve the performance of our /books API endpoint and tools that use it
• Improving the functionality of the network catalog
• Improving usage statistics at the network level
• Adding the ability for network managers to set some default theme options at the network level
• Exploring direct importing of Google Docs
• Pursuing official certification for our LTI Provider plugin

These are our big projects; as always, we'll continue to refine and improve Pressbooks in smaller ways in each sprint. If you have any questions we're always happy to discuss! Our first Open Source call of the year will be on Monday, January 7th at 2pm Eastern. An agenda and Zoom link will be posted here and on our community forum by Monday morning.

/**
 * A task that takes way too loooooooooooooooooooooooong...
 */
function task() {
    step1();
    step2();
    step3();
    //
    step100();
}

Into this:

/**
 * Yields a key/value pair
 * The key is between 1-100 and represents percentage completed
 * The value is a string of information for the user
 *
 * @return Generator
 */
function taskGenerator() {
    step1();
    yield 1 => 'Completed step 1';
    step2();
    yield 2 => 'Completed step 2';
    step3();
    yield 3 => 'Completed step 3';
    //
    step100();
    yield 100 => 'Completed step 100';
}
/**
 * A task that takes way too loooooooooooooooooooooooong...
 */
function task() {
    foreach ( taskGenerator() as $percentage => $info ) {
        // Do nothing, this is a compatibility wrapper
        // that makes our generator work like a regular function
    }
}

And this:

let evtSource = new EventSource(url);

Before

Currently, cloning a book in Pressbooks looks like this:

Spinning beach ball of death.

The user clicks submit. They wait, and wait, and wait. The task completes and they receive some feedback saying "everything seems fine". It's not particularly pleasant but it does the job. Typical open source WordPress installs, and by extension Pressbooks, don't have the resources, infrastructure, or competence to setup job queues and delegate these kind of tasks into the background. Everyone lives with it. The end.

Insert cliché "What if I told you" meme here.

After

It is possible to use PHP Generators and Event Streams to provide real-time feedback to the web browser.

The EventStream console in Chrome Browser.

With a bit of refactoring cloning a book in Pressbooks, instead, looks like this:

A status bar with real-time status updates.

The heavy lifting is done by an EventStreams class (Source code).

On the front end, the main changes were from this:

<input type="submit" />

To:

<p><input type="submit" /></p>
<div id="pb-sse-progressbar"></div>
<p id="pb-sse-info"></p>

And some JavaScript:

$("#pb-cloner-form").on("submit", function (e) {
  e.preventDefault();
  $("#pb-cloner-button").attr("disabled", true);
  let form = $("#pb-cloner-form");
  let eventSourceUrl =
    PB_ClonerToken.ajaxUrl +
    (PB_ClonerToken.ajaxUrl.includes("?") ? "&" : "?") +
    $.param(form.find(":input"));
  let evtSource = new EventSource(eventSourceUrl);
  evtSource.onopen = function () {
    $("#pb-cloner-button").hide();
  };
  evtSource.onmessage = function (message) {
    let bar = $("#pb-sse-progressbar");
    let info = $("#pb-sse-info");
    let data = JSON.parse(message.data);
    switch (data.action) {
      case "updateStatusBar":
        bar.progressbar({ value: parseInt(data.percentage, 10) });
        info.html(data.info);
        break;
      case "complete":
        evtSource.close();
        if (data.error) {
          bar.progressbar({ value: false });
          info.html(data.error);
        } else {
          window.location = PB_ClonerToken.redirectUrl;
        }
        break;
      default:
        break;
    }
  };
  evtSource.onerror = function () {
    evtSource.close();
    $("#pb-sse-progressbar").progressbar({ value: false });
    $("#pb-sse-info").html("EventStream Connection Error");
  };
});

(Source code)

The JavaScript (and jQuery) snippet:

• Targets a form with id pb-cloner-form
• Stops the form from submitting and instead
• Appends all the form data as $_GET parameters to an ajax URL then
• Passes that ajax URL to a new EventSource
• Updates pb-sse-progressbar and pb-sse-info when it receives an event stream message
• Redirects the user back to where they started when complete

On the back end, the time consuming function was refactored into a generator that yields a key/value pair. The key is between 1-100 and represents percentage completed. The value is a string of information meant for the user. Once you have a generator that follows this convention, pass it to the EventEmitter. The browser will start receiving an event stream.

/**
 * @return Generator
 */
function loooooooooooooooooooooooongGenerator() {
    // Pseudo code
    yield 1 => 'Looking up the source book';
    sleep( 2 );
    yield 10 => 'Creating the target book';
    sleep( 2 );
    // ..
    sleep( 2 );
    yield 100 => 'Done';
}
$emitter = new \Pressbooks\EventStreams();
$emitter->emit( loooooooooooooooooooooooongGenerator() );

(Source code).

Key ideas:

• It's not necessary to wait until the request finishes, PHP can emit event-stream responses (SSE) back to the web browser while it is working on something. - PHP Generators are a relatively simple refactoring hack to get those responses back to the browser. - sleep() is only meant as an example of a function call that takes a long time to finish, don't put sleep in your production code, you already knew this, I hope?

Originally posted on my personal blog in a more generic format, with references to the movie Office Space, but it turns out it was me, doing research for Pressbooks, the whole time.

WIP: https://github.com/pressbooks/pressbooks/issues/1282

In brief: we have deactivated Gutenberg for Pressbooks users, so upgrading to WordPress 5.0 will not change your editing experience. We’ve done this in Pressbooks itself, so additional plugins like Classic Editor are not required. We’ve made this decision for several reasons.

1. Gutenberg has continued to change significantly up to the projected release date, without a sufficient period of API and UI stability.

At Pressbooks, our small development team accomplishes a lot with limited resources, but ensuring compatibility with Gutenberg in time for its November 19th launch has proven to be beyond our capacity. The lack of clarity in Gutenberg’s development process has hindered us from integrating Gutenberg into our roadmap. We are now two weeks from its production release, and Gutenberg’s API freeze is not yet complete. We’ve been tracking blocking issues over the last year and a half and have tried to contribute where possible, but ongoing API and user interface changes have made it difficult for us to keep on top of things without neglecting Pressbooks core development, and have made us hesitant to invest our limited resources in building on a codebase that has not yet stabilized. Once WordPress 5.0 is released, we will be able to evaluate a stable version of Gutenberg and map out a plan for integration.

2. Gutenberg lacks functionality that Pressbooks relies upon.

Because Pressbooks is used to produce content for the web and for export, we leverage WordPress custom post statuses to determine whether chapters and other content appear on the web, in export files, or both. (Custom post statuses do not have a full-featured public API in WordPress, but they were the best solution for our use case. This is not the fault of the Gutenberg team—arguably, it’s our fault—but that’s where we are.) We also use a custom post submission UI to more clearly reflect content status for our users. At this point in time, Gutenberg does not support custom post statuses, which is a fundamental issue for us (and others who leverage this functionality). Furthermore, the new post publish panel is not easily modified, and we feel that it’s important to maintain continuity of this interface for our users. Following the release of WordPress 5.0, we will engage on these specific issues with the WordPress and Gutenberg development teams so that we can provide our users with a familiar experience in this area.

3. Gutenberg does not meet Pressbooks’ accessibility standards.

WordPress Accessibility team lead Rian Rietveld’s resignation in early October and the team’s recent report on Gutenberg have brought widespread attention to the accessibility shortcomings of the Gutenberg project. These issues are not new, as some have implied; Rietveld documented many in March of this year, and tests of Gutenberg by Léonie Watson and Sina Bahram highlighted significant problems around the same time. Rietveld’s resignation, the team’s report, and the conversations surrounding them have highlighted flaws in the Gutenberg development process and have underscored how hard it is to retrofit an existing interface if it was not designed with accessibility and inclusivity in mind. We're currently making accessibility improvement to elements of our core UI that date back to the early days of our product—so we know this from firsthand experience! More importantly, though, we’re continually seeking to expand our own shared understanding of accessibility and inclusive design principles so that new features are inclusive from day one. We’re grateful to Jess Mitchell, Jonathan Hung, and the rest of the team at OCAD’s Inclusive Design Research Centre for their guidance as we work towards these goals.

We acknowledge the assessment of the WordPress Accessibility team, who write that “based on [Gutenberg’s] current status, we cannot recommend that anybody who has a need for assistive technology allow it to be in use on any sites they need to use at this time.” We’re grateful to the many accessibility experts and advocates who have shone a spotlight on accessibility in WordPress, particularly the volunteers who form the WordPress Accessibility team. We’re also grateful to Rachel Cherry and the WPCampus organization, who are funding a much-needed accessibility audit of Gutenberg. As our focus is on continuously improving Pressbooks’ accessibility and all signs suggest that Gutenberg would undermine this goal in its current state, we will be awaiting the results of WPCampus’ audit following the release of WordPress 5.0, and we will evaluate our next steps at that time.

Closing Thoughts

There are parts of the Gutenberg project that we’re pretty excited about. The ability to add and edit complex elements visually could be extremely helpful for book production, allowing educational textboxes and other specialized content to be edited visually while ensuring clean, semantic output on the front end. We’d love to be able to allow shortcodes to be edited visually, which Gutenberg supports. And we’re eager to see what comes of Gutenberg’s Annotation API, which could support expanded integrations with tools like Hypothesis. However, knowing what we know at this point and for the reasons articulated above, we feel that a “wait and see” approach is most prudent for us and our users. We are committed to tracking each of these issues and doing what we can to ensure that authors using our software have the best available tools for the job at hand. We look forward to a future where Gutenberg can be used for making books.

• Image attributions (thanks to Brad and Alex at BCcampus)
• New shortcodes to facilitate adding more complex content

We also released a new Open Source plugin, Pressbooks Shibboleth SSO, which provides bilateral Shibboleth SSO integration for Pressbooks networks. And we converted a few more themes to use Buckram, our theme component library, which gives us added flexibility to add new theme options for all themes.

In Q4 we're wrapping up a few loose ends from our Q3 goals:

• UX improvements to the webbook Table of Contents
• UX improvements to the Export page

We're also working on:

• UI and UX improvements to the Theme Options page
• Adding support for DOIs in Book Info and metadata outputs
• Testing integration with Gutenberg, WordPress' new editing interface
• Continuing to convert themes and improve Buckram

As always, we'd love to hear your ideas for Pressbooks, so feel free to share them in the Pressbooks Community Forum!

Our initial goal with adding SASS support to Pressbooks was limited in scope. We needed to support non-Latin character sets (Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and many more) but we wanted to keep book export sizes small by only bundling these additional fonts when they were needed. So we added a new theme option (Global Typography, now known as Language & Script Support) which allowed users to select additional non-Latin languages for their book which would be dynamically imported into their stylesheet during export.

After the release of Pressbooks 3.0, we realized the potential of SASS and SASS variables for allowing users to customize various aspects of their book’s theme which until then we had been forced to hard-code on a theme by theme basis (or insert by searching and replacing placeholder strings in vanilla CSS). Clarke was the first theme we converted to our new theme structure, now known as Buckram. When we released the rebuilt Clarke theme alongside Pressbooks 3.6.0 in June 2016, users gained access to a host of new PDF theme options, allowing margins, running content, and more to be customized via a settings page.

We wanted to bring this flexibility to our other themes, and since the release of Clarke 2.0 we’ve been slowly working towards that goal with Buckram. It’s been in the works for a couple of years now, but only over the past six months have we been able to dedicate significant time and developer resources to bringing it into a stable 1.0 release (coming early July!).

So, what is Buckram? Last September at our team retreat in Montréal, I demoed it to our friends at the Rebus Foundation, and Boris nicknamed it “Bookstrap”. That’s kind of what it is; like Bootstrap, Buckram is a set of styled components for book theming, with corresponding markup, that can be customized with SASS variables. It’s raw material for our book themes, so we named it after buckram, a material of physical bookbinding.

Here’s how Buckram works, in brief. A book theme imports Buckram’s component files and default variables via SASS imports, and then overrides specific variables with custom values.

Let’s say you’d like to customize the way your theme displays blockquotes. They’re found within the blockquotes partial and the corresponding variables file. If you’ve started by scaffolding a book theme with our command line tool, you’ll find the following file in /assets/styles/components/_elements.scss:

// Elements

// Override variables above this line, using the !default flag to allow further overrides.
@import "variables/elements";

// Add custom SCSS below these imports and includes.
@import "components/elements";

Let’s say you want to add a left border and padding to your blockquotes. You can just do this, with reference to the source variables file (or the docs):

// Elements

$blockquote-padding-left: 1em !default;
$blockquote-border-left-width: 2px !default;
$blockquote-border-left-style: solid !default;
$blockquote-border-left-color: #333 !default;

// Override variables above this line, using the !default flag to allow further overrides.
@import "variables/elements";

Now the values you’ve supplied will override the defaults from variables/elements, giving your blockquotes a padding-left value of 1em and a border-left value of solid 2px #333. We take advantage of the SASS !default flag, which lets a variable that comes before another variable override it. In this example:

$color: red;
$color: blue !default;

The $color variable will be set to red, as it precedes a variable flagged with !default.

Using !default flags for the custom values in a theme, as demonstrated above, means that we can add theme options to allow further overrides that users control. So a theme may have a default font for body text, but in the future we’ll be able to let users customize body text by selecting an alternative typeface from a dropdown, overriding all rules where that font is referenced by changing a single variable. Moving our themes to Buckram will make the theme customization experience for Pressbooks users flexible in ways that we’ve always dreamed it would be.

So far, we’ve got three open source themes built with Buckram (Clarke, Jacobs and McLuhan). The newest member of our dev team, Daniel Fernandes, has been hard at work converting our backlog of premium themes to Buckram, and we’ll be releasing them over the coming months. We also will be expanding our documentation for Buckram, and improving the Pressbooks CLI tools for building new Buckram themes so that all Open Source users can benefit from the work that’s gone into our theme structure. We’re excited for what Buckram will let us do, and we welcome your feedback, bug reports and code contributions.

• Pressbooks CAS SSO Plugin * Pressbooks LTI Provider Plugin

We didn't manage to finish as many roadmap items as we expected, but here's what we crossed out:

• ✔ Improve textbox and table styling across all formats
• ✔ Finalize new theme structure and begin migrating themes
• ✔ Add support for Common Cartridge import and export

We'll be going forward with a simplified list for Q3, with only a couple of big items. We want to focus Q3 on general housekeeping tasks such as UX improvements and backend optimisations:

Big projects

• Provide basic support for Shibboleth SSO
• Add new shortcodes to facilitate authoring
• Begin researching analytics solutions

Housekeeping items

• UX improvements to the webbook Table of Contents
• UX improvements to the Export page
• Other backend and frontend UX improvements
• Accessibility improvements
• Ongoing theme conversions

If you’re planning on working on any of these items or would like to collaborate, please let us know in the forums or tweet @pressbooksdev!

Pressbooks is committed to ensuring that our software is accessible to users and readers. We understand accessibility and inclusive design to be holistic, proactive processes that must be built into our product specification and development workflow. We also recognize that as a publishing tool, we have an opportunity to facilitate the production of accessible content. With this in mind, we are working with accessibility and inclusive design experts at OCAD University’s Inclusive Design Research Centre and others to identify areas for improvement.

For full details, you can consult the policy.

As noted in this morning's sprint preview, we are tackling a number of accessibility issues in our current sprint thanks to clear, actionable feedback from Jonathan Hung and the team at the Inclusive Design Research centre. We're thrilled to be collaborating with the IDRC to make our project more inclusive to all users, and we're grateful for their insight as we develop our internal expertise on these vital issues.

A Framing Device

Conceptually, I find it helpful to think of our book themes as two things: a frame and a picture.

Take McLuhan, our default book theme. It's really two elements in one. The first element is a (fairly conventional) WordPress theme which provides the user interface for reading a Pressbooks book on the web. This is the "frame" — the user interface (UI) for readers of a webbook. The other component is the "picture" — styles which format the content of the book for display, either within the webbook "frame" or in other formats such as PDF, EPUB, or MOBI.

McLuhan provides the UI for all Pressbooks webbooks, even those that use other styles for their content. All other book themes are WordPress child themes, which means that they inherit the "frame" (the webbook UI) from McLuhan, the parent theme^[1]. So if you change your book's theme to Jacobs, you're putting a new "picture" in the original frame:

To demonstrate this more concretely, here's a webbook using McLuhan:

And the same webbook using Jacobs:

No difference except the typography of the book content.

Luther's Legacy

Our old default book theme was Luther. When we built Luther, we made a tactical error and mixed the content styles for web into the UI styles. By failing to separate these concerns, we made the transition from Luther to McLuhan more awkward than it could have been; when we rebuilt the webbook UI in McLuhan, we had to supply some (now missing) content styles for old themes^[2] that had been relying on the Luther webbook stylesheet to properly display some of the webbook content. We've learned from this mistake, and all of our work on webbook UI and web content styles going forward will emphasize a proper separation of concerns.

Next: What's Buckram?

The next part of this series will be a deep dive into Buckram, the SCSS book component library that is at the heart of our new batch of themes. Until next time!

• ✔ Ensure support for H5P interactive elements with graceful fallbacks across all formats
• ✔ Ensure support for video and audio with graceful fallbacks across all formats
• ✔ Add support for multiple contributors (authors, editors, translators, etc.)
• ✔ Add custom metadata support to the Pressbooks REST API and clone tool
• ✔ Finish our new landing page theme
• ✔ Finish our new webbook theme
• ✔ Improve section heading outputs in EPUB and PDF
• ✔ Develop two new themes oriented towards textbook and OER use cases
• ✔ Add support for chapter-level cloning
• ✔ Overhaul the Organize page, prioritizing accessibility, fully responsive design, and inline and batch editing support of front matter/chapter/back matter properties

Now's the time for us to share some of our plans for Q2. We've drawn from our overall roadmap for this year and we'll be trying to address many of the top priorities and feature requests we've been hearing about from our clients and Open Source users.

Editing and Content

• We’ll be working to test and fully support the WP QuickLaTeX plugin, which will improve the quality of LaTeX formulas in PDF exports.
• We'll be engaging in research and development with an eye on further mathematics support improvements across all formats.
• We'll be working to test and fully support the TablePress plugin, which will allow more advanced table display.
• We'll be engaging in research and development with the goal of improving to media management and image uploading, including user-facing guidance to ensure high-quality image output across all formats.
• We'll be refining our approach for supporting the forthcoming WordPress Gutenberg editor.

Core Technology

• We'll be engaging in research and development on various popular enterprise integrations for Pressbooks, including LTI and various single sign-on (SSO) methods, with the goal of ensuring that Pressbooks better supports these integrations.

Themes and Theme Design

• Based on user feedback, we'll continue to refine the McLuhan (webbook) and Aldine (landing page) themes that we released at the end of February.
• We'll continue to refine Buckram, our book theme component library, and we'll continue to convert legacy themes to use Buckram and fully support the theme options that are currently available in Clarke, Jacobs, and McLuhan. This work will include updates to the open source Austen and Donham themes.
• We'll be continuing research and development towards implementing new markup for books, based on HTMLBook.

Import, Export, and Cloning

• We'll be testing the BCcampus OpenStax Importer for Pressbooks to see if can be added to our recommended plugins list.
• We'll be reviewing various implementations of Common Cartridge import and export to ensure first-class support for this format.
• We'll be exploring ways of tracking the adoption of Open Textbooks.

User Interface

• We'll be engaging in research and development on methods of configuring default theme options and other settings for books at the network level.
• We'll be engaging in research and development on methods for providing book-level analytics on networks where books are in subdirectories as opposed to subdomains, and exploring other types of book- and network-level analytics.

Accessibility & Inclusivity

• We'll be working with the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) to integrate their User Interface Options tool into McLuhan and Aldine.
• We'll be implementing other accessibility and inclusivity improvements on the front-end and back-end based on feedback from the IDRC.

If you're planning on working on any of these items or would like to collaborate, please let us know in the forums or tweet @pressbooksdev!

We really liked this idea, so Dac built a similar feature into Pressbooks 5. Now, when future updates to Pressbooks show up on the plugins page of a Pressbooks, users will see whether or not their Pressbooks-specific add-ons have been tested with the latest version:

If you develop plugins that extend Pressbooks functionality (we check for pressbooks in the plugin slug, name, and description), you can add Pressbooks tested up to: 5.0.0 (or whatever version string is relevant) to your plugin headers, and Pressbooks will reflect your plugin's compatibility in the update notice. We hope this feature will give network administrators a better understanding at a glance of whether they can safely update to the latest version of Pressbooks. Of course, we still encourage thorough testing in a development or staging environment before installing a major update.

So, borrowing from the WP-CLI project where I first saw this implemented, I've created a GitHub repo for ideas from Pressbooks users. If you have an idea for Pressbooks that you'd like to suggest to our team, you can open an issue. We will evaluate your ideas on a regular basis for inclusion in our sprints and longer-term roadmap. You can check on the status of your idea by visiting the idea board.

I'm looking forward to seeing what emerges! As always we welcome feedback and discussion in the forum.

Data Changes

Content Visibility

In Pressbooks 4.x and earlier, the visibility of content across different media is controlled by a combination of custom post metadata and core post status. For front matter, back matter and chapters, the pb_export post meta value determines whether or not they appear in exports, while their post status (draft, pending, private, or publish) determines their visibility in the webbook.

In an effort to better conform to WordPress best practices and streamline the user experience, we’re using the post status as the source of truth for whether front matter, chapters, and back matter appear in web, exports, or both. We’ve added a new web-only post status, and content visibility will now be determined as follows:

In terms of the user interface, we're changing this:

To this:

Note that we're changing the primary action button from "Publish" for new content and "Update" for existing content to "Create" and "Save", respectively.

Your front matter, back matter and chapters will be automatically updated when you visit your book after updating to Pressbooks 5.

Contributor Management

Pressbooks 4.x lets you add a single author and multiple contributing authors, editors, and translators in your Book Information and lets you add a single author for each front matter, back matter, or chapter. Pressbooks 5 imports all your existing authors (and Pressbooks users who are assigned to your book) and creates entries in a new contributor taxonomy. Then, it repopulates new relevant metadata fields with a list of contributors that match your book’s existing contributors. For example, if you have an author named Alice X and two editors named Bob Y and Eve Z, your Book Information will contain the following in Pressbooks 4.x:

In Pressbooks 5, your Book Information will contain the following:

The values saved in Book Information are the slugs of entries in the contributor taxonomy. Also, for backwards-compatibility, the new field names are pluralized so that any third-party code that looks for the old fields will still be able to retrieve them for the time being.

You’ll be able to edit the display names of these contributors in one place — the new Contributors page, which is a standard WordPress taxonomy management page — and you’ll be able to quickly and easily select from your list of contributors to add assign authors throughout your book (if you have a book that consists of chapters with different authors, and you also want to include credits for all the authors in your Book Information, this will make maintaining that information much easier). In future releases of Pressbooks, we will be able to add metadata to contributors, including profile pictures, author websites, and more, for display on your webbook cover page or individual front matter, back matter, and chapters.

We're also adding a new class, \Pressbooks\Contributors, and some other related functions to retrieve arrays or formatted lists of contributors.

The migration of your book’s contributor data will happen automatically when you visit your book after updating to Pressbooks 5.

Licenses

In the same way that we’re moving contributor data to a contributor taxonomy, we’re moving the available licenses into a new license taxonomy. That way, if you need to add a custom license for your book, it will immediately be available in all chapters, front matter, and back matter as well as your Book Information. This migration will happen automatically when you visit your book after updating.

Export Changes

HTMLBook Preview

In Pressbooks 5, we’ve introduced a new HTMLBook export module as a proof of concept. We’re excited about the potential of adopting and advancing this proposed standard for the semantic representation of books on the web, and we will be actively developing our export module in the months to come. We're also working with the creators of HTMLBook to expand and improve the standard (to begin with, we're proposing the addition of new front matter and back matter types and of new block elements, including educational textboxes).

At this time, our HTMLBook exporter is not production-ready, but we will be using it as a testbed to refine our best practices for coding export modules in Pressbooks.

XHTML and EPUB Markup Changes

We're making a change to the way we mark up our XHTML and EPUB exports, but only for themes that use our SCSS component library, Buckram. In Pressbooks 4.x, chapter subtitle and author elements are not wrapped in the same container as the chapter number and title:

<div class="chapter standard" id="chapter-1">
  <div class="chapter-title-wrap">
    <h3 class="chapter-number">1</h3>
    <h2 class="chapter-title">Loomings</h2>
  </div>
  <div class="ugc chapter-ugc">
    <h2 class="chapter-author">Herman Melville</h2>
    <h2 class="chapter-subtitle">The First Chapter</h2>
    <p>Call me Ishmael.</p>
  </div>
</div>

This makes it very difficult to reliably style the first page of front matter, back matter, and chapters.

In Pressbooks 5, books that use Buckram-based themes will now have the following markup:

<div class="chapter standard" id="chapter-1">
  <div class="chapter-title-wrap">
    <h2 class="chapter-title">Loomings</h2>
    <h2 class="chapter-author">Herman Melville</h2>
    <h2 class="chapter-subtitle">The First Chapter</h2>
  </div>
  <div class="ugc chapter-ugc">
    <p>Call me Ishmael.</p>
  </div>
</div>

This change will only impact themes using Buckram, which include our open source Clarke theme and the premium Asimov theme (the latter only available to Pressbooks EDU or Pressbooks.com users). We are thoroughly testing these Buckram-based themes to ensure that this change does not affect existing books. If you have built a theme using Buckram, we suggest you test your theme as well once this issue has been closed.

Filesystem Changes

In Pressbooks 4.x, all export files, (S)CSS and other user-generated files are stored in subfolders of your book’s uploads directory. We’re moving them all into a pressbooks folder to prevent conflicts between our files and any other files that plugins may generate. This will happen without the need for any intervention on your part.

Wait, half a million database tables?! Answered in Part 1.

Plan

1. Stop the server, take an LVM snapshot.
2. Use mydumper to dump the snapshot to SQL files.
3. rysnc these to the new server.
4. Use myloader to load the SQL files into the new databases.

Captain Not So Obvious

Why not setup the Aurora as a replica and then switch over?

Because our MariaDB server was a bare metal box outside of AWS. The read Replica docs imply that MySQL has to already be in AWS for that to work. If that's not enough this doc says use mysqldump to start, then sync after. This doc also says use mysqldump. All signs point to nope.

Why not DMS?

Answered in Part 1.

Mostly, at the end of the day, because our hosted networks are already on AWS it was simply more cost effective to shut down our freemium site and migrate in one swoop than to have our whole team keep at this for weeks, possibly months.

Epilogue: What About Uploads?

Each book has media library files (GIF, PNG, JPG, EPUB, PDF, etc). A few days before the migration, we copied all files from the production server's uploads/ directory using rsync:

rsync -avz -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" someuser@oldpressbooksdotcom:/path/to/uploads/ /path/to/uploads/ --progress

This process took about 10 hours.

Then, on migration day, we ran the same command again with the --delete option to update the new server with the latest files from the old server and remove any files that have been deleted on the old server:

rsync -avz --delete -e "ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null" someuser@oldpressbooksdotcom:/path/to/uploads/ /path/to/uploads/ --progress

Much quicker! (around 7 minutes)

Launch it!

“If we get into the trees it could be rather disastrous, so we’ve got to hit the roses.” – Ken Carter

Scripts from Part 1 (read it already!) were modified to include Slack notifications:

notify() {
  read -d '' payLoad << EOF
  {
    "channel": "#operations",
    "username": "Pressbot",
    "icon_emoji": ":closed_book:",
    "text": "Slice \`${1}\` has been imported on AWS."
  }
EOF

  curl \
    --write-out %{http_code} \
    --silent \
    --output /dev/null \
    -X POST \
    -H 'Content-type: application/json' \
    --data "${payLoad}" "https://hooks.slack.com/services/<SLACK_WEBHOOK_ID>"
}

# Usage

notify $slice

In an effort to reduce downtime we imported slices as soon as they were transferred. Dumping was faster than imports.

Ned working hard:

All while coding sprint tasks in between.

Things That Went Wrong

We noticed an embarrassing typo in the first few database slices we imported. We had to redo them because renaming a database with tens of thousands of tables in it is not obvious.

I ordered takeout from the wrong fish & chips shop. I had to take a subway 30 minutes to downtown to get it. (Psst Foodora, your geolocation feature sucks!)

Otherwise, nothing. We landed in the roses.

Timeline

• 8:00: Migration started.
• 10:40: Database migration started.
• 19:10: Database migration completed!
• 19:30: Migration completed.
• Total time: 11 hours 30 minutes.

DONE. Exciting to turn the page on this. Thanks for reading.

Does It Scale?

At Pressbooks we use WordPress Multisite as a development platform. Pressbooks changes WordPress and makes every blog a book.

The prevailing wisdom of the day is that a relational database should have a manageable set of tables with lots of rows of data in them ...and then there's WordPress.

WP Multisite creates 10 database tables for every blog (or in our case: for every book.) Tables share IDs but they are not enforced at the database level. There are no foreign key constraints, no triggers, nor routines. It's simple no frills MySQL.

Pressbooks dot com is currently running on a single bare metal server. (Our hosted instances are already on AWS) This server has a single MariaDB database with 60,000 books in it. When we do the math that's over 600,000 tables in one database. Are you nuts?! Unusual? Horrible? Yet entirely possible, even plausible.

I've met people who worked at Automattic and from the stories, I heard WordPress dot com uses the same WP Multisite technology but instead of half a million tables it's over a billion tables (probably not all in the same database though, more on that later).

I call this the Schrödinger's Cat of database design because so long as we don't look it's alive?

Prerequisites

As I said, we already host hundreds of WP Multisite networks on AWS. We build, manage, and deploy to our infrastructure using Terraform, Ansible, wp-cli and all things competent. We simply just, sort of, well, neglected to move our freemium site over because we were too busy.

The time has come.

Research

We tried mysqldump. It was too slow. Our tests showed that a dump would take days.

Some colleagues recommended AWS DMS. It did not work. Some reasons:

• The AUTO_INCREMENT attribute is not migrated.
• WP Multisite tables are prefixed wp_1_, wp_2_, wp_3_, ... MySQL considers the underscore a one character wildcard when used in LIKE queries, DMS provided no way to escape it for table filters.
• Unexplained crashing on anything less than a c4.large (failed last Error The task stopped abnormally Stop Reason RECOVERABLE_ERROR Error Level RECOVERABLE)
• Mostly, the fastest migration we could get going, running 4 tasks in parallel, was an ETA of 10 days

We asked for help. Ned had a conference call with a reputable consulting firm and they gave us a quote: $34K USD + travel & on-site expenses.

Next, our research led us to mydumper. From the README:

== What is mydumper? Why? ==

• Parallelism (hence, speed) and performance (avoids expensive character set conversion routines, efficient code overall)
• Easier to manage output (separate files for tables, dump metadata, etc, easy to view/parse data)
• Consistency - maintains snapshot across all threads, provides accurate master and slave log positions, etc
• Manageability - supports PCRE for specifying database and tables inclusions and exclusions

So far so good...

== How to build it? ==

Just kidding. It turns out we don't have to build mydumper. On Ubuntu sudo apt install mydumper works fine. Similar command using yum on CentOS.

Our tests conclude that mydumper finishes in hours instead of days.

Plan

It is our opinion that this kind of problem is better suited for a document-oriented database. Given that this is the database design we inherited, there's not much we can do about it, so we'll try our best with what we've got. ¯\(ツ)/¯

At a billion tables, Automattic has already established its own internal best practices with plugins like HypderDB. Unfortunately HyperDB doesn't have Composer support and doesn't look maintained. LudicrousDB, a Composer compatible drop-in that works with our existing tech stack, to the rescue.

LudicrousDB is an advanced database interface for WordPress that supports replication, fail-over, load balancing, and partitioning, based on Automattic's HyperDB drop-in.

With LudicrousDB tested and working, we are moving towards a 101 slice approach. 1 slice for core tables and 100 slices for books.

The idea is to use the last two digits of a book ID to pick one of 100 slices. If this becomes unmanageable in the future (important to remember that we already have over half a million tables in 1 database and things are fine), we can change the splitting algorithm by adding a condition to use the last X digits on books with IDs bigger than Y.

Code

For informational purposes only. Read the snippets and reason about them. Copy/paste at your own peril.

LudicrousDB Callback

/**
 * Slices
 *
 * We can predict what slice a blog is in by looking
 * at the last two digits of the id. Examples:
 *
 * + blog_id: 9, in db09
 * + blog_id: 74, in db74
 * + blog_id: 999989, in db89
 * + blog_id: 9200, in db00
 *
 * @param $query
 * @param \LudicrousDB $wpdb
 *
 * @return string
 */
function pb_db_callback( $query, $wpdb ) {
  if ( preg_match( "/^{$wpdb->base_prefix}\d+_/i", $wpdb->table ) ) {
    $last_two_digits = (int) substr( $wpdb->blogid, -2 );
    $db = sprintf( 'db%02d', $last_two_digits ); // db00, db01, db02, ..., db99
    return $db;
  } else {
    return 'global';
  }
}
$wpdb->add_callback( 'pb_db_callback' );

Export DB Into 101 Slices:

#!/bin/bash

# This script will CREATE 101 directories in current
# working directory, you have been warned!

db='old_database_name'

sudo mydumper --regex="^${db}\.wp_[a-zA-Z]+.*" --database="${db}" --outputdir="core" --build-empty-files
for ((i=0; i<=99; i++)); do
  ii=`printf %02d $i`
  sudo mydumper --regex="^${db}\.(wp_${i}_|wp_\d+${ii}_).*" --database="${db}" --outputdir="${ii}" --build-empty-files
done

Import 101 Slices:

#!/bin/bash

# This script will READ 101 directories in current
# working directory

db='new_database_name'

sudo myloader --directory="core" --database="${db}" --overwrite-tables
for ((i=0; i<=99; i++)); do
  ii=`printf %02d $i`
  sudo myloader --directory="${ii}" --database="${db}_${ii}" --overwrite-tables
done

Did it work?

https://youtu.be/RA5WCpFY0PE

To be continued in Part 2...

Bonus tips:

Because Pressbooks has so many MySQL tables, the Clients I use are always getting stuck or freezing. Here are some tricks I use to keep sane:

• Don't let MySQL Workbench load the table schemas. Set up your GUI so that schemas are in a separate tab, disable autoloading, autocomplete, etc. (Edit ⇨ Preferences ⇨ SQL Editor)
• Disable MySQL CLI auto-completion with --disable-auto-rehash

2017: Year of Core

I want to highlight a few of our accomplishments from the past nine months (you'll see them crossed out on the old roadmap). In retrospect, our clear focus over the past nine months was improving Pressbooks’ core technology. When Dac came back, having a second developer let us expand upon my efforts in recent years to standardize our development processes under the hood. We now use consistent coding standards across all of our open source projects, and we have adopted a standardized build process for admin and front end assets. We have expanded our code coverage on the core Pressbooks plugin, and continue to do so with every release. These improvements let us work more efficiently and give open source contributors a clear framework within which to contribute to the Pressbooks ecosystem.

Our most significant core enhancement is our new REST API, built on the WordPress Core REST API infrastructure. This is the engine that powers our new cloning tool, and we will be making use of it in other areas over the next year. We’re also extremely excited to see what the Pressbooks Open Source community does with an API for books. If you are building something with it, let us know.

2018: Year of the Author

The roadmap for our next year has a new focus: improving Pressbooks for authors. There are a number of editing features that we included on our last roadmap that didn’t make the cut, and our goal for the next year is to fill as many of these gaps in the Pressbooks authoring toolset as we can. This includes:

• Broadening our support for math, interactive content, video and audio across all formats (with graceful fallbacks in static formats like PDF)
• Adding support for multiple contributors: authors, editors, translators and more
• Adding indexing and glossary support

And more! Take a look at our new roadmap to see our comprehensive plans for improving Pressbooks’ authorship and editing tools, as well as all other aspects of the project.

I’m very excited about our accomplishments since January 2017, and I’m looking forward to building on them over the next year. Thanks to Apurva, Dac, Hugh, Liz, and Zoe for making Pressbooks such a productive team!

Open Textbooks are powerful not just because they are free for students, but also because teachers and profs (or even students) can easily improve them and modify them for the particular needs of their students.

Theory vs. Practice

In theory, at least.

In practice, all that 5R-y stuff can be difficult: How do you revise a PDF? How do you remix an EPUB? How do you redistribute a print book?

Clone me, please!

The new answer—at least for Open Textbooks built on Pressbooks as of now is: You clone them!

That is, you can now, with the click of a button, clone/copy a complete Pressbooks book (including all metadata, image and media, and content) from one Pressbooks account or instance to another, as long as the original book is:

• Openly licensed (i.e. licensed with a Creative Commons license)
• Publicly available on the web

And this means, once you’ve cloned that book, you can 5R it to your heart’s content!

Wait, does this mean anyone can just copy my book?

No. No. No! … No, cloning is only possible in the case that:

• Your book is openly licensed (with a Creative Commons license)
• You book privacy setting is: public on the web

So for any books that have standard copyright, or are not available on the web—this doesn’t apply.

Why would you clone a book?

This is, we think, a very exciting development for the Open Textbook ecosystem.

Here are just some of the ways we expect the new feature to be utilized:

• A community college wants to make changes to the level of subject matter in an open textbook that was originally created for upper-division undergraduates.
• A faculty member wants to adapt an open textbook to reflect the way they personally teach the subject matter.
• A university department wants to copy the books contained in a catalogue at a similar department in another university.
• An instructor wants to make a copy in order to have their class expand an existing open textbook as part of a classroom project.

Cloning ultimately allows books built in Pressbooks to become more modular and easily adaptable for more courses.

Pressbooks, Ryerson University & eCampus Ontario

Have you heard about the exciting Open Textbook work happening in Ontario?

This cloning feature was developed as part of a project Pressbooks is doing with Ryerson University, funded by a grant from eCampusOntario, developing infrastructure for Open Resource Publishing in Ontario.

Also under this project, Pressbooks is getting a full design refresh, including redesigns of the book home page, the webbook reading interface, and, for Pressbooks systems, updates to the landing page and Pressbooks’ built-in catalog page.

So, How Do I Start Cloning?

The bad news is: This feature is not available on Pressbooks.com. Cloning is an educational feature only available in standalone Pressbooks systems (Pressbooks EDU client systems and Pressbooks open source). (Contact us if you're interested in us hosting a Pressbooks EDU system for you.)

Pressbooks.com also supports replicating books. However, the process of copying a book is more labour intensive, and requires users to reach out to original creators for the book’s XML files. This new cloning feature omits these steps for enterprise users, making duplication possible with only a few clicks of a button.

Learn more about how to use the new cloning feature.

Most of the development work we undertake under this grant will be released as open source improvements to the Pressbooks GPL codebase — so anyone using Pressbooks will benefit.

Pressbooks as we've dreamed since, well, 2010

This project is going to allow us to develop some of the most exciting capabilities of Pressbooks, something we have been dreaming of since, well, since I started working on Pressbooks way back in 2011.

In particular, we will be making some very visible improvements, including a redesign of the “webbook” interface (for reading Pressbooks books online) and a refresh of the standard catalog page for dedicated Pressbooks instances (such as this one, hosted by BCcampus).

APIs and Cloning

But the more exciting work is going on under the hood, where we’ll be migrating the Pressbooks API (built by Brad Payne from BCcampus) to the WordPress core REST API, extending the metadata capabilities, and building “cloning” of Pressbooks books into Pressbooks core (also leaning on work done by Brad).

This means that you’ll soon be able to point at any openly-licensed Pressbooks book in the universe, and pull it into your own Pressbooks environment, to enable the famous 5Rs of Open Educational Resources: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute.

An API for Books (finally!)

What does this mean? This means Pressbooks will, finally, be able to fulfill a promise I’ve been thinking about since I started Pressbooks back in 2011: an API for books.

Indeed, looking through some archives, I am gratified to see that we’ve managed to build a lot of what I laid out in my May 2010 (!!) article for O’Reilly: “An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform.”

More exciting is that we are now poised to move beyond that initial set of ideas, and offer something I wrote about a year later, in September 2010 (!), An API for Books.

It’s taken a while, but we’re getting there!

The past number of years have been an exercise in patience: We have always had dedicated and faithful users—from self-publishers to academic presses—who love Pressbooks because of how easy it makes formatting books for print and ebook stores.

But the real power of Pressbooks, from my perspective, has always been hidden in the plain sight of the web: all Pressbooks books are web-native from the start.

Open Textbooks and the Web

The Open Textbook movement is really the first coherent usecase for Pressbooks that has emerged to embrace the potential in Open, webby book publishing systems. So, it’s been gratifying to see the Pressbooks open source software being adopted in the Open Textbook world, by such leading projects as: Lumen Learning, BCcampus, and OpenSUNY.

At the same time, it’s been a challenge for a small company like ours to support the exciting Open Textbook possibilities of Pressbooks with our limited resources. This new project will enable us to move much faster towards an Open Textbook future we hope for.

Working with Ryerson and eCampusOntario

We’re thrilled to be working with some great people at Ryerson University on this project: Wendy Freeman, Fangmin Wang, Ann Ludbrook, Sally Wilson, and the rest of their team. And we're excited as well to be working on an eCampus Ontario project: David Porter and Lena Patterson have a a great vision for the future of Open Textbooks in Ontario, and we’re excited to be part of it.

If you’d like more information about Pressbooks and Open Textbooks, get in touch!

Pressbooks has never been a typical WordPress plugin. It is a platform, not a plugin, and as such it completely transforms the WordPress interface into a content management system for book authoring and formatting. Furthermore, it requires WordPress Multisite and it also requires a number of third-party libraries to support its export routines (epubcheck, KindleGen, PrinceXML and xmllint to name a few) which cannot be installed on shared hosting environments. As such, Pressbooks is not a WordPress plugin that is particularly useful without:

1. A virtual private server (VPS) environment;
2. An advanced knowledge of WordPress configuration, especially multisite;
3. Some devops experience.

Over the years, we have encountered many WordPress users who installed Pressbooks from the WordPress Plugin Repository on their existing blogs[1. Don't do this!] and were frustrated by the experience. After much consideration, we have decided that the best way to support all users of the Pressbooks plugin is to remove it from the WordPress Plugin Repository and distribute it via GitHub.

For those who don't want to run their own Pressbooks infrastructure, we offer the following options:

• Pressbooks.com, for authors and small publishers creating a single book or a handful of books per year
• Pressbooks EDU, our premium hosted service for educational institutions
• Pressbooks Publisher, our premium hosted service for publishers

For those who are interested in running their own networks, we are working to improve the installation documentation and provide several methods to keep Pressbooks updated.

1. Conducting an audit of the Pressbooks administration interface for accessibility and inclusivity (see pressbooks/pressbooks#487);
2. Conducting an audit of the Pressbooks web book theme and root theme interfaces for accessibility and inclusivity (see pressbooks/pressbooks#488);
3. Integrating the IDRC Fluid Project’s display preferences tool into the Pressbooks web book theme and root theme interfaces (see pressbooks/pressbooks#489);
4. Assessing potential tools to help authors review their books’ content for accessibility and inclusivity (see pressbooks/pressbooks#490).

In our discussion of the fourth point, we heard from Josie, who in her work at BCcampus has been using a combination of tools (including Total Validator and AChecker and manual review against to the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to assess the accessibility and inclusivity of their OERs. Jess and Jonathan also recommended WAVE for this.

We plan to have a second meeting of the accessibility group within one month (tentatively on Wednesday, October 26, 2016) and in the meantime, I will be working with Jess and Jonathan to get a development instance of Pressbooks running at the IDRC for auditing purposes, working on the integration of the Fluid display preferences module, and continuing discussions with Jess and Jonathan on the IDRC’s metadata tools. Brad and Josie will work on compiling a matrix of problem patterns that Josie has identified in her content review work, and Jess and Jonathan will walk through their audit process and results with the accessibility group at our next meeting so that we can all get a sense of best practices. Thanks to everyone who could join us today! It was an exciting first meeting, and we’re looking forward to continued collaboration on this important component of the Pressbooks project.

├── export
│   ├── epub
│   │   ├── images
│   │   │   ├── asterisk.png
│   │   │   ├── em-dash.png
│   │   ├── style.scss
│   ├── prince
│   │   ├── images
│   │   │   ├── em-dash.png
│   │   ├── script.js
│   │   ├── style.scss
├── _fonts-epub.scss
├── _fonts-prince.scss
├── _fonts-web.scss
├── _mixins.scss
├── functions.php
├── style.css
├── style.scss
├── theme-information.php

We’re in the midst of a significant re-think of how we build themes, and here’s what it looks like so far.

├── assets
│   ├── images
│   │   ├── em-dash.png
│   │   ├── epub
│   │   │   ├── asterisk.png
│   ├── scripts
│   │   ├── prince
│   │   │   ├── script.js
│   ├── styles
│   │   ├── epub
│   │   │   ├── _fonts.scss
│   │   │   ├── style.scss
│   │   ├── prince
│   │   │   ├── _fonts.scss
│   │   │   ├── style.scss
│   │   ├── web
│   │   │   ├── _fonts.scss
│   │   │   ├── style.scss
│   │   ├── components
│   │   │   ├── _accessibility.scss
│   │   │   ├── _alignment.scss
│   │   │   ├── _colors.scss
│   │   │   ├── _elements.scss
│   │   │   ├── _elements-special.scss
│   │   │   ├── _media.scss
│   │   │   ├── _structure.scss
│   │   │   ├── _titles.scss
│   │   │   ├── _toc.scss
├── functions.php
├── style.css
├── theme-information.php

All three core outputs now keep their assets in the assets folder, with shared assets going in the directory roots of assets/fonts (when needed), assets/images, assets/scripts and assets/styles. We used to keep the uncompiled web stylesheet in the theme root along with a compiled version, but this caused some confusion. The style.css file in the theme root was never loaded in the web view; since Pressbooks 3.0, we’ve always used a freshly compiled version which is generated when the user changes themes or changes their theme options. But WordPress requires that theme information be stored in the file header of style.css. Our practice moving forward will be to use the style.css file in the root for theme information only, and keep a style.scss file for the web book in assets/styles/web/.

Each of the files in assets/styles/components imports a global components file or file(s) and a variables file for the relevant item(s) from the Pressbooks plugin’s assets/book/styles/ directory (which is loaded by our SCSS compiler). For example, assets/styles/components/_elements.scss might contain the following:

// Elements

$orphans: 3 !default;

// Change variables above this line, using the !default flag to allow overrides.
@import "variables/elements";

// Add custom SCSS below these imports and includes.
@import "components/elements/links";
@import "components/elements/blockquotes";
@import "components/elements/body";
@import "components/elements/headings";
@import "components/elements/lists";
@import "components/elements/miscellaneous";
@import "components/elements/paragraphs";
@import "components/elements/tables";
@include tables();

In this hypothetical theme, all of the default element styles have been imported but the theme developer has changed the orphan property from 1 to 3. (Using the SCSS !default flag allows a variable like this to be overridden by the book user once we overhaul our theme options.)

All of these component files are imported into the EPUB, PDF and web style.scss files, like so:

$type: "prince";

@import "fonts";
@import "../components/alignment";
@import "../components/colors";
@import "../components/elements";
@import "../components/specials";
@import "../components/media";
@import "../components/titles";
@import "../components/structure";
@import "../components/toc";

So now we have a book theme with a more coherent structure, comprehensive default variables and an easy method to override them, and lots of possibilities.

We have lots to do to move forward with the implementation of this new theme structure (including backwards compatibility). You can follow along on the theme-structure branch to observe or participate in the implementation process. If you want to get involved in the discussion of these changes, feel free to join in on the relevant GitHub issue!