Week of 15 February 2016

The following information summarizes what is new in the edX platform this week.

The edX engineering wiki Release Pages provide detailed information about every change made to the edx-platform GitHub repository. If you are interested in additional information about every change in a release, create a user account for the wiki and review the dated release pages.

EdX Studio

  • When you change your password in Studio by selecting Forgot password on the sign in page, the sign in page now appears with a “Password Reset Email Sent” message. Previously, a page that was blank except for the header appeared. (TNL-3573)
  • Beta testers for self-paced courses can now access the course before the course start date. (ECOM-3612)

EdX LMS

  • Beta testers for self-paced courses can now access the course before the course start date. (ECOM-3612)
  • To enhance accessibility, updates have been made to the descriptions in the “How to use edX discussions” key and to some labels on the Discussion page. For example, the description for the “Follow” icon (a blue star) in the key was changed to “Follow or unfollow posts” from “Follow posts for updates”, and the help text that appears in the Search field has been changed to read Search all posts. (AC-23)
  • To enhance accessibility, the tool tip messages that appear for the “Unanswered” question mark icon in problem assignments are now presented as complete sentences. (AC-252)

Open edX

  • For sites that are running an Open edX instance, the Dogwood release is now available. Dogwood, the fourth release of the Open edX platform, contains new features for learners, course teams, and developers. For more information, see the Open edX Dogwood Release or this Dogwood blog post on the Open edX portal.
  • The OAuth 2.0 provider library has been updated to version 0.5.0. This update includes support for the client credentials grant.
  • In this release, Ruby has been removed from the edx-platform repository. As a result, the prereqs paver command no longer installs the prerequisite environment for Ruby, and the edxapp user on new instances of Devstack will no longer have rbenv in the search path. However, discussion forums use Ruby, and the forums user continues to have rbenv in the search path.
  • An error that prevented the Django admin GlobalStatusMessage view from displaying a list of status messages has been corrected. ConfigurationModelAdmin.get_readonly_fields now returns coursemessage_set as a field name. (TNL-4048)