Here’s what we’re working on this sprint:
And other bug fixes and improvements as we find them!
One of the most complex aspects of Pressbooks is the way our book themes work across different formats. It even confuses us sometimes. In a series of posts this week, I hope to clarify some of the concepts that underpin our book theming system, reflect on how it has evolved over the years, and outline where we hope to take book themes in the future.
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 theme1. 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.
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 themes2 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.
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!
Aldine 1.2.1 is now available, with a bug fix for the Call to Action toolbar button. You can read the full changelog here.
We released minor bug fixes for Pressbooks and McLuhan today. You can check out the changelogs here:
Here’s what we will be focusing on for our first sprint of Q2:
(Note: We’ve decided to push the development of the new version tracking feature that was planned for our past sprint to a subsequent sprint.)
Minor releases of Pressbooks, McLuhan, and Aldine, are now available. These releases add a few small but oft-requested features and fix a variety of minor bugs. Please note that Pressbooks 5.2.0 and McLuhan 2.2.0 are inderdependent and must be updated together.
Thanks to Ed Beck, Antonio Devís at Books for Languages, Thomas Dumm at Delivros, Josie Gray at BCcampus, Mike Shiflet at Ohio State, and Justin Swapp for the bug reports and suggestions!
Full changelogs are available here:
We’ve just released Jacobs 1.0.1, which fixes an issue which caused <h1> elements to be displayed in titlecase and updates the theme license to GPL v3.0 or later. You can also read the full changelog.
We just released Pressbooks 5.1.1, which fixes a few minor issues. Thanks to Josie Gray at BCcampus, Naomi Salmon at UW-Madison, and Mike Shiflet at Ohio State for their bug reports! You can read the full changelog here.
With our sprint previews, idea board, and various other initiatives, we’re increasing our efforts to foster and engage the Pressbooks Open Source community 1. As part of this process, we have decided to set up an Open Collective account for the Pressbooks Open Source project so that our Open Source users can, if they wish to, contribute financially to the ongoing development of Pressbooks. While we are very proud of our PressbooksEDU enterprise hosting service (and it remains the best way to provide stable, ongoing financial support to the project), we recognize that this isn’t the right option for many users, and that those who still rely on Pressbooks may want a different way to contribute. If that’s you, please consider backing us on Open Collective, with either a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution. Either way, even if you’re not in a position to contribute, we’re glad to have you in our Open Source community!
Our last sprint of Q1, running March 19–30, will focus on:
