frontend-app-authoring

Purpose

This implements most of the frontend for Open edX Studio, allowing authors to create and edit courses, libraries, and their learning components.

A few parts of Studio still default to the "legacy" pages defined in edx-platform, but those are rapidly being deprecated and replaced with the React- and Paragon-based pages defined here.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Tutor is currently recommended as a development environment for the Authoring MFE. Most likely, it already has this MFE configured; however, you'll need to make some changes in order to run it in development mode. You can refer to the relevant tutor-mfe documentation for details, or follow the quick guide below.

Cloning and Setup

1. Clone your new repo:

git clone https://github.com/openedx/frontend-app-authoring.git

2. Use node v20.x.

The current version of the micro-frontend build scripts supports node 20. Using other major versions of node may work, but this is unsupported. For convenience, this repository includes an .nvmrc file to help in setting the correct node version via nvm.

3. Stop the Tutor devstack, if it's running: tutor dev stop
4. Next, we need to tell Tutor that we're going to be running this repo in development mode, and it should be excluded from the mfe container that otherwise runs every MFE. Run this:

tutor mounts add /path/to/frontend-app-authoring

5. Start Tutor in development mode. This command will start the LMS and Studio, and other required MFEs like authn and account, but will not start the Authoring MFE, which we're going to run on the host instead of in a container managed by Tutor. Run:

tutor dev start lms cms mfe

Startup

1. Install npm dependencies:

cd frontend-app-authoring && npm ci

2. Start the dev server:

npm run dev

Then you can access the app at http://apps.local.openedx.io:2001/course-authoring/home

Troubleshooting

• If you see an "Invalid Host header" error, then you're probably using a different domain name for your devstack such as local.edly.io or local.overhang.io (not the new recommended default, local.openedx.io). In that case, run these commands to update your devstack's domain names:

tutor dev stop
tutor config save --set LMS_HOST=local.openedx.io --set CMS_HOST=studio.local.openedx.io
tutor dev launch -I --skip-build
tutor dev stop authoring  # We will run this MFE on the host

• If tutor-mfe is not starting the authoring MFE in development mode (eg. tutor dev start authoring fails), it may be due to using a tutor version that expects the MFE name to be frontend-app-course-authoring (the previous name of this repo). To fix this, you can rename the cloned repo directory to frontend-app-course-authoring. More information can be found in this forum post.

Features

Feature: Pages and Resources Studio Tab

Enables a "Pages & Resources" menu item in Studio, under the "Content" menu.

Requirements

The following are requirements for this feature to function correctly:

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • discussions.pages_and_resources_mfe: must be enabled for the set of users meant to access this feature.
• frontend-app-learning: This MFE expects it to be the LMS frontend.
• frontend-app-discussions: This is what the "Discussions" configuration provided by this feature actually configures. Without it, discussion settings are ignored.

Configuration

In additional to the standard settings, the following local configuration items are required:

• LEARNING_BASE_URL: points to Learning MFE; necessary so that the View Live button works
• ENABLE_PROGRESS_GRAPH_SETTINGS: allow enabling or disabling the learner progress graph course-wide

Feature Description

Clicking on the "Pages & Resources" menu item takes the user to the course's pages-and-resources standalone page in this MFE. (In a devstack, for instance: http://localhost:2001/course/course-v1:edX+DemoX+Demo_Course/pages-and-resources.)

UX-wise, Pages & Resources is meant to look like a Studio tab, so reproduces Studio's header.

For a particular course, this page allows one to:

• Configure the new Discussions MFE (making this a requirement for it). This includes:
  • Enabling/disabling the feature entirely
  • Picking a different discussion provider, while showing a comparison matrix between them:
    • edX
    • Ed Discussion
    • InScribe
    • Piazza
    • Yellowdig
  • Allowing to configure the selected provider
• Enable/Disable learner progress
• Enable/Disable learner notes
• Enable/Disable the learner wiki
• Enable/Disable the LMS calculator
• Go to the textbook management page in Studio (in a devstack: http://localhost:18010/textbooks/course-v1:edX+DemoX+Demo_Course)
• Go to the custom page management page in Studio(in a devstack http://localhost:18010/tabs/course-v1:edX+DemoX+Demo_Course)

Feature: New React XBlock Editors

This allows an operator to enable the use of new React editors for the HTML, Video, and Problem XBlocks, all of which are provided here.

Requirements

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • new_core_editors.use_new_text_editor: must be enabled for the new HTML Xblock editor to be used in Studio
  • new_core_editors.use_new_video_editor: must be enabled for the new Video Xblock editor to be used in Studio
  • new_core_editors.use_new_problem_editor: must be enabled for the new Problem Xblock editor to be used in Studio

Feature Description

When a corresponding waffle flag is set, upon editing a block in Studio, the view is rendered by this MFE instead of by the XBlock's authoring view. The user remains in Studio.

Feature: New Proctoring Exams View

Requirements

• edx-platform Django settings:
  • ZENDESK_*: necessary if automatic ZenDesk ticket creation is desired
• edx-platform Feature flags:
  • ENABLE_EXAM_SETTINGS_HTML_VIEW: this feature flag must be enabled for the link to the settings view to be shown
• edx-exams: for this feature to work, the edx-exams IDA must be deployed and its API accessible by the browser

Configuration

In additional to the standard settings, the following local configuration item is required:

• EXAMS_BASE_URL: URL to the edx-exams deployment

Feature Description

In Studio, a new item ("Proctored Exam Settings") is added to "Other Course Settings" in the course's "Certificates" settings page. When clicked, this takes the author to the corresponding page in the Course Authoring MFE, where one can:

• Enable proctored exams for the course
• Allow opting out of proctored exams
• Select a proctoring provider
• Enable automatic creation of Zendesk tickets for "suspicious" proctored exam attempts

Feature: Advanced Settings

Requirements

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.use_new_advanced_settings_page: this feature flag must be enabled for the link to the settings view to be shown. It can be enabled on a per-course basis.

Feature Description

In Studio, the "Advanced Settings" page for each enabled course will now be served by this frontend, instead of the UI built into edx-platform. The advanced settings page holds many different settings for the course, such as what features or XBlocks are enabled.

Feature: Files & Uploads

Requirements

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.use_new_files_uploads_page: this feature flag must be enabled for the link to the Files & Uploads page to go to the MFE. It can be enabled on a per-course basis.

Feature Description

In Studio, the "Files & Uploads" page for each enabled course will now be served by this frontend, instead of the UI built into edx-platform. This page allows managing static asset files like PDFs, images, etc. used for the course.

Feature: Course Updates

Requirements

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.use_new_updates_page: this feature flag must be enabled.

Feature: Import/Export Pages

Requirements

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.use_new_export_page: this feature flag will change the CMS to link to the new export page.
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.use_new_import_page: this feature flag will change the CMS to link to the new import page.

Feature: Tagging/Taxonomy Pages

Requirements

• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • new_studio_mfe.use_tagging_taxonomy_list_page: this feature flag must be enabled.

Configuration

In additional to the standard settings, the following local configuration items are required:

• ENABLE_TAGGING_TAXONOMY_PAGES: must be enabled (which it is by default) in order to actually enable/show the new

Tagging/Taxonomy functionality.

Feature: Libraries V2/Legacy Tabs

Configuration

In additional to the standard settings, the following local configurations can be set to switch between different library modes:

• MEILISEARCH_ENABLED: Studio setting which is enabled when the meilisearch plugin is installed.
• edx-platform Waffle flags:
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.disable_legacy_libraries: this feature flag must be OFF to show legacy Libraries V1
  • contentstore.new_studio_mfe.disable_new_libraries: this feature flag must be OFF to show Content Libraries V2

Developing

Devstack. If you start Devstack with make dev.up.studio that should give you everything you need as a companion to this frontend.

If your devstack includes the default Demo course, you can visit the following URLs to see content:

• Pages and Resources

Troubleshooting

• npm ERR! gyp ERR! build error while running npm install on Macs with M1 processors: Probably due to a compatibility issue of node-canvas with M1.

  Run brew install pkg-config pixman cairo pango libpng jpeg giflib librsvg before npm install to get the correct versions of the dependencies. If there is still an error, look for "no package [...] found" in the error message and install missing package via brew. (Automattic/node-canvas#1733)

Deploying

Production Build

The production build is created with npm run build.

Internationalization

Please see refer to the frontend-platform i18n howto for documentation on internationalization.

Getting Help

If you're having trouble, we have discussion forums at https://discuss.openedx.org where you can connect with others in the community.

Our real-time conversations are on Slack. You can request a Slack invitation, then join our community Slack workspace. Because this is a frontend repository, the best place to discuss it would be in the #wg-frontend channel.

For anything non-trivial, the best path is to open an issue in this repository with as many details about the issue you are facing as you can provide.

https://github.com/openedx/frontend-app-course-authoring/issues

For more information about these options, see the Getting Help page.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the AGPLv3 unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE for details.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. Please read How To Contribute for details.

This project is currently accepting all types of contributions, bug fixes, security fixes, maintenance work, or new features. However, please make sure to have a discussion about your new feature idea with the maintainers prior to beginning development to maximize the chances of your change being accepted. You can start a conversation by creating a new issue on this repo summarizing your idea.

The Open edX Code of Conduct

All community members are expected to follow the Open edX Code of Conduct.

People

The assigned maintainers for this component and other project details may be found in Backstage. Backstage pulls this data from the catalog-info.yaml file in this repo.

Reporting Security Issues

Please do not report security issues in public, and email security@openedx.org instead.