Q2 Roadmap Preview

Pressbooks Team

We're drawing near the end of Q1 at Pressbooks! And we've crossed off a lot of the items on our 2018 Roadmap:

  • ✔ 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

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!