We’ve got a big series of changes to Pressbooks book themes coming up. Depending what stage your book is in, you may want to take action. Read on for details.
Why the changes?
The Pressbooks team has been working on developing better, standardized, more user-friendly book themes for almost a year now. If you’ve been using the McLuhan, Asimov, Clarke, or Jacobs themes, you may have noticed that there are more settings available in the Theme Options than you’re used to. These improvements are part of a major project to overhaul and enhance all the book themes on Pressbooks.
We’re now expanding the number of themes these options are available on. Starting on Aug. 22, we’ll be rolling out updates to a few more themes every two weeks. The updates will improve each theme’s baseline structure, allow us to issue continuous improvements, and make it easier for you to customize your book’s design without having to know CSS.
The changes improve each theme’s available design customization options. However, they also improve the standard, overarching design of the theme. While we have made every effort to maintain all of the design elements that make each theme unique, some elements of your book may be slightly altered after it undergoes the upgrade. However, you can lock your theme to prevent these changes from affecting your book.
If you don’t want updates to the base theme to affect the layout of your book, lock your theme before Aug. 21.
Do I have to lock my theme?
No, you don’t. Locking your theme means not receiving any future updates, including bug fixes.
You should only lock your book theme if:
- You are happy with the way your book looks, AND
- You need to preserve the current page count of your book (ex: you have already sent a copy to the printer, or you have manually created references to specific numbers)
- OR You want all design elements of your book to stay exactly as is in every format, regardless of current potential bugs or quirks that may be resolved by future theme updates.
This is the only notification you will get about the upcoming theme changes. We will not send further reminders. If it is important to you to maintain your exact page count or layout, we encourage you to enable theme lock now by going to Settings > Export from the left-hand menu of your book’s dashboard and checking the Lock Theme box.
Have questions about the upcoming changes? Contact support@pressbooks.com.
