04-21 Newsletter: 2021 Conference, Theming Improvements, Open Source MOOC

Posted by Gabriel D'Amours on May 20, 2021

Here is a recap of OpenCraft's April 2021 newsletter.

Open edX Conference

The 2021 Open edX Virtual Conference has officially been announced! The event is structured as a half day event and will occur on Thursday, May 27th, between 1PM and 5PM (UTC). Our CTO Braden will be hosting a talk on LabXChange and Open edX’s next-generation learning content storage system, Blockstore. OpenCraft is proud to contribute to the organization of the event, as well as being its main sponsor. Tickets are on sale now, and we hope to see you there!

-> Learn more about the Conference program

Branding and Theming Improvements

We’ve been investigating improvements to the way theming works on the Open edX platform, with the aim of making theming faster, easier to use, easier to maintain, and more flexible. One of the first things we’ve investigated is the way forward with creating a consistent theme across edx-platform and micro front-ends (MFE). MFEs are Javascript applications that contain Open edX branded headers, footers and style, and allow for flexibility and rapid development of features that affect user experience. We would love to hear your feedback on this, so please read and comment on the following Merge Request.


-> See a detailed list of our theming goals, findings, and progress

Lilac Release

The Build-Test-Release group, steered by Adolfo from OpenCraft, has been hard at work preparing for the next release of Open edX, Lilac. The codebase has already been made available for testing, and the working group is now busy making sure that not only is everything behaving as one would expect, but is also documented! Which is to say, this time around we’re aiming for the release notes to be available on release day, which is a nice improvement. Stay tuned, and please write back if you would like to help!

-> Keep tabs in the Build-Test-Release category in the forum

Learning To Contribute

Have you ever wanted to contribute a feature or a bugfix to the official version of Open edX, but didn’t know how? Would you like to avoid the recurring headache at each release upgrade, caused by changes made only on your local installation that need to be adapted? There should be a MOOC for that, right?! OpenCraft is now proud to be working with several organizations (edX, Mines-Telecom, OpenStack, Wikimedia) to co-produce a reference course on how to contribute to open source software (“upstreaming”).

-> Read more about the MOOC project on the Open edX forum

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