Open edX Release 4 

Anticipated cut date: Week of 26 Oct 2015  Will not be cut until Django upgrade is released and stable, anticipating mid December timeframe.

Anticipated final release: Week of 07 Dec 2015  Currently aiming at mid-January, due to Django upgrade and December US holidays.

Note: We aim to get the Django upgrade into this release, so dates are extremely tentative until we have a clearer picture of when this work will land.

New Services & Major Upgrades Planned for This Release

• Ecom Services for Dogwood
  
  • Only outstanding item is documentation
• Insights in Dogwood
  • Plan forthcoming
• /wiki/spaces/TNL/pages/34013441
  • Working with T&L Lahore
• 
  • Necessary for SSO and LTI applications to work
  • Desire to get this into next named release; contingent perhaps around getting better ux support
• MongoDB/Pymongo Upgrade
  • Feanil Patel to provide some tickets for this work (Ops & Platform work)
• CohortMembership fix ()
  • Includes a management command, course_groups/post_cohort_membership_fix, to be run after data migrations.
• Python 2.7.10 Upgrade
  • Users will have to re-build virtualenvs from scratch.
  • New vagrant images will have the correct virtualenvs and Python version.
  • 

• Course Overviews as source of truth for list of courses.
  • Includes a management command, "manage.py lms --settings=X generate_course_overview --all", to be run after data migrations.
  • If this management command is not run,
    • deployments that run with ENABLE_COURSE_DISCOVERY set to False, may see courses missing on their Course Catalog page
    • the Courses API "/api/courses/v1/courses/" may not include all courses in the system

Deprecations

• "shoppingcart" functional should be considered deprecated as of Dogwood and will be removed in a future release. Similar services will be provided by "Otto" going forward
• ORA1 code is completely removed
• Legacy instructor dash is turned off by default, and will be removed entirely in Eucalyptus
• Old code has been removed:
  • Admin dashboard
  • abtest_module
  • Psychometrics
  • "Licenses" djangoapp
  • FoldIt XModule
  • Studio course checklists
• Removed support for the outdated ispublic field on the Course Module, including its corresponding ACCESS_REQUIRE_STAFF_FOR_COURSE feature flag.  Instead, operators should use COURSE_CATALOG_VISIBILITY_PERMISSION and COURSE_ABOUT_VISIBILITY_PERMISSION settings.
• The "graphical_slider_tool" is deprecated, and will no longer be available starting in in Eucalyptus (the code has been removed from Master).

Things that didn't make it into Dogwood

• Student Notes in Dogwood
  
  • Probably won't happen - work is on the bubble
• NLTK upgrade  (delayed to Eucalyptus)
• Badging in Dogwood

Release Checklist