Dogfooding Dogwood

This week, the Open edX community announced its latest release, Open edX Dogwood. (In case you don’t follow the Open edX community closely, its releases are alphabetically named after trees, so on the heels of the Birch and Cypress releases, we now have Dogwood, and Eucalyptus will be next.)

Our team got involved in Open edX around the Cypress release timeframe, and we shifted our OpenStack integration work to track the master branch in December, to ensure we would be ready in time for Dogwood. hastexo Academy also tracks master, so if you take one of our self-paced online courses, you’ll be running the latest and greatest from Open edX.

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Checking out the new features

There are several new features in Open edX Dogwood, some of which we tested and ran, with somewhat mixed (but generally positive) results.

Platform upgrades

Open edX now builds upon Django 1.8 and Python 2.7.10. It’s great to see some technical debt pay-down by moving beyond the now-unsupported Django 1.4. We hope to see this continue by Eucalyptus hopefully moving to the next Ubuntu LTS, 16.04 “Xenial Xerus”.

It would also be great to see a move to Python 3, but we’re not holding our breath on that, for various reasons — including the fact that Ansible, which Open edX uses for deployment, also still requires Python 2.

Comprehensive theming

Comprehensive theming is a new and improved way to apply theming and branding to Open edX platforms, which will eventually replace the current “Stanford” theming engine (named after an Open edX theme developed at Stanford University, which became a popular basis for rebranding the Open edX LMS). In mid-January, we shifted our own Stanford-style Open edX theme to Comprehensive Theming and test-deployed on hastexo Academy, then still in pre-launch. We ran into a critical bug that has been fixed for the release, and will come back to redeploying our new Comprehensive theme at a later date.

We’re also waiting for a patch to the edx-configuration Ansible repository to land, so we can properly deploy our Comprehensive theme to our Open edX instance.

Otto

We also looked extensively at the new Open edX ecommerce framework, “Otto”, for buying and sellling course seats. Sadly, we found multiple issues that prevented us from using it in our infrastructure for the time being, and we pushed Otto off for our Eucalyptus respin.

Otto has no support for tax assessment on course seats; this is a show stopper for anyone who wants to sell courses to people in Europe, as course seats are Digital Goods under EU VAT regulations and require VAT assessment. We were admittedly a little dismayed to find that Otto had made some design decisions that made this impossible to fix in the way you would normally do this in the Oscar framework that Otto builds on. Fixing Otto in-place would likely have delayed our Academy launch by several months, so that was a delay we were unwilling to accept. There are other issues with Otto, notably the fact that it comes with its own PayPal integration (as if django-oscar-paypal didn’t exist), which made us rather uncomfortable.

So we instead integrated hastexo Academy with our own, pure-Oscar web store that makes use of upstream community supported features much more extensively than Otto, and that also enables us to sell other products and services besides hastexo Academy course seats.

LTI XBlock

With the Dogwood release, the LTI XModule has been refactored into the LTI Consumer XBlock. While we do not currently use this XBlock in production, it comes in very handy as a good reference for XBlock unit tests, which we’ll be using to improve the test coverage in our own XBlock.

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Open edX integration with OpenStack

Our OpenStack integration work for Open edX is continuing at its regular, steady pace.

Running Open edX Dogwood on OpenStack

You’re of course still able to deploy Open edX on OpenStack, using the Heat templates we’ve maintained since Cypress.

Running the hastexo XBlock on Open edX Dogwood

The hastexo XBlock, enabling course authors to define arbitrarily complex lab environments for courses with OpenStack Heat, is of course fully supported for Open edX Dogwood. That’s exactly what you’re using when speeding through interactive labs on hastexo Academy.

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Congrats, and thanks!

Congratulations are in order for the entire development community! Our team at hastexo would like to extend a big thank-you to everyone who made a contribution to this release.

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This article originally appeared on my blog on the hastexo.com website (now defunct).