Eucalyptus

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.