Open edX Release 5

Planned Installation Improvements

• An installation script that:
  • Insists on an OPENEDX_RELEASE value
  • Requires fewer commands to be copied and pasted
  • Records how it was run
  • Logs obsessively
• Better-named branches (dogwood.rc is confusing)

New Services & Major Upgrades Planned for This Release

• Mobile
  • Profiles, Native Course Discovery, Push Notifications, and Forums
• Front end
  • EdX Pattern Library and EdX UI Toolkit (deprecated) are now included in edx-platform
  • Many JavaScript libraries have been upgraded to more recent versions (including JQuery, Underscore and Backbone)
  • JavaScript tests are run using Karma rather than JS-Test-Tool
  • Large number of CoffeeScript files have been converted to JavaScript
  • See Initial rollout plan for the UI Toolkit and Pattern Library for more details
  • JavaScript translations are now built statically instead of dynamically on each request: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/11381
• Notes API?
• LMS Next and Previous buttons and eventing
• Open Badges improvements: UI for viewing badges in a user's profile, new sharing modal, XBlock service for issuing badges, new configuration options to issue badges
• Support for OpenStack Swift as an object store

Deployment Issues to Keep in Mind

• This change to problem-builder might need a fake-initial, though it's in edx-private: https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/11295
• CSMH separation: Initial CSMH Separation Migration and official docs
• Existing users will be logged out because of changes we made to session handling
• Ruby was removed:
  • https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/11110
  • https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/11470
  • https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/2767
  • https://github.com/edx/configuration/pull/2762

• OAuth library update requires manual steps:

  • Ansible installation currently does not properly handle prereq removal before installing new libraries.  This causes `__init__.py` to be removed from django-oauth-toolkit.  It can be fixed by running:
    $ pip uninstall django-oauth-toolkit edx-oauth2-provider
$ pip install -r requirements/edx/base.txt


  • Migrations need to be fixed to handle moving edx-oauth2-provider from oauth2_provider to edx_oauth2_provider and installing django-oauth-toolkit.
    $ ./manage.py lms migrate --fake oauth2_provider zero
$ ./manage.py lms migrate --fake-initial

• Bulk Email on the Instructor Dashboard has been disabled as a result of moving the feature flag and will need to be manually re-enabled, See readthedocs for details.

Monthly product notes

• June 2016: https://open.edx.org/announcements/june-2016-open-edx-product-update
• May 2016: https://open.edx.org/announcements/may-2016-open-edx-product-update
• April 2016: https://open.edx.org/announcements/april-2016-open-edx-product-update
• March 2016: https://open.edx.org/announcements/march-2016-open-edx-product-update
• February 2016: https://open.edx.org/announcements/february-2016-open-edx-product-update
• January 2016: https://open.edx.org/announcements/january-2016-open-edx-product-update-0

Information not in the weekly edx.org Release Notes

• feature flags, configuration options, deployment changes, etc.
• We have removed support for the always_recalculate_grades xBlock field. When set to true it caused significant performance issues, and it is not currently used in any of our active XBlocks. Please let Sandy Student (Deactivated) know if you have any questions.