Wrong footer links (and copyright)

[mariajgrimaldi]

Expected behavior

Footer includes seven (7) links, namely About, Blog, Contact, Donate, Terms of Service & Honor Code, Privacy Policy, Take free online courses at edX.org. All links must be working.

Actual behavior

Actual links are:

About Us Blog Donate Terms of Sevice Privacy Policy Help Contact Us

This is at https://redwood.demo.edly.io/

Steps to reproduce

Go to https://redwood.demo.edly.io/

Scroll down.

Additional information

TC_LEARNER_48 also fails, as copyright notice also does not match. Supposed to be “All rights reserved except where noted. edX, Open edX and their respective logos are registered trademarks of edX Inc.” and instead it's "Copyrights ©2024. All Rights Reserved."

[mariajgrimaldi]

The generic links make sense, but I'm not sure about the copyright part.

[mariajgrimaldi]

Original issue: openedx/wg-build-test-release#348

[regisb]

While I agree that the footer links in the Indigo footer must be improved (and in some cases: fixed), can we have a discussion about the "official" list of links that should be included? In particular:

1. Does it make sense to include "Blog" if many platforms don't have a blog?
2. Does it make sense to include "Donate" if most platforms are for-profit?
3. Does it make sense to include "Take free online courses at edX.org" even though it encourages the confusion between edX and Open edX?

[ZaraAhmedEdx]

@mariajgrimaldi if you feel we should replace the footer links, can you confirm which ones these should be?
The Open edX website has Axim's privacy policy, terms of use, etc. But the Open edX Sandbox environment redirects to the privacy policy and terms of use of Open edX.

[mariajgrimaldi]

I don't think footer links should change, mainly because it's a design decision for every theme designer. The official redwood test sheet specifies a few tests regarding themes, which include:

TC_LEARNER_3:
Footer includes seven (7) links, namely About, Blog, Contact, Donate, Terms of Service & Honor Code, Privacy Policy, Take free online courses at edX.org. All links must be working.

TC_LEARNER_48:
Ensure the copyright is mentioned: “All rights reserved except where noted. edX, Open edX and their respective logos are registered trademarks of edX Inc.”

Since this is the default theme for the Open edX release sandbox, testers follow those descriptions to test so this kind of issue is raised. Therefore, I think we should discuss whether the default theme should follow the "official" standard or a new one, so we can update those tests accordingly.

Where do you think we should have this discussion?

[regisb]

Let's have this discussion here. Alternatively, if there is no consensus, we can have a live conversation about it.

The disagreement is about the following items:

1. "About" replaced by "About Us".
2. "Terms of Service & Honor Code" replaced by "Terms of Service". (
3. The order of the footer links.
4. The suppression of the "Take free online courses at edX.org" link.
5. The suppression of the "Donate" link. (which I think that Indigo should remove, but the link is currently in place)
6. The suppression of the copyright notice: “All rights reserved except where noted. edX, Open edX and their respective logos are registered trademarks of edX Inc.”

Am I missing something? I'd like to argue that these items are actually improvements for most people over the previous, default theme. In particular, the copyright notice is unnecessary because the theme does not mention Open edX anywhere. Well, there is the "powered by Open edX" image but it links straight to open.edx.org, and so there is no need to specify that copyright. For comparison, notice that the official Wordpress theme does not include a copyright notice: https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentyfour/preview/

If the test sheet is supposed to test the default theme, then we should disable Indigo in testing. But I think that would be a huge loss. Instead, I propose that we amend the two tests the following way:

1. Remove TC_LEARNER_48
2. Rephrase TC_LEARNER_3: "All footer links must be working"

[jmakowski1123]

I'm investigating re: the copyright statement....

[mariajgrimaldi]

@jmakowski1123 @crathbun428: Do you have any updates on the copyright statement? Also, how can we approach using Indigo theme by default when using the Open edX default theme is what's expected? I'm leaning toward what Regis suggested. Should we update the test sheet to capture that better?