Forum Email Notifier

Purpose

This plugin for the Open edX platform sends email notifications to users when there are forum updates. It also allows to configure notification digest frequency for the instructor.

Compatibility Notes

Open edX Release	Version
Palm	>= 0.3.0
Quince	>= 0.3.0
Redwood	>= 0.3.0

The settings can be changed in platform_plugin_forum_email_notifier/settings/common.py or, for example, in tutor configurations.

NOTE: the current common.py works with Open edX Palm, Quince and Redwood version.

Dependencies

This plugin depends on the following commit, which emits the forum events. Depending on the version of Open edX you are using, it is necessary to make a backport.

These changes are available from Redwood release.

View from the Learning Management System (LMS)

Configuring required in the Open edX platform

You must include the following setting in the LMS to enable the filter that will display add the new tab for On Task:

OPEN_EDX_FILTERS_CONFIG = {
  "org.openedx.learning.instructor.dashboard.render.started.v1": {
      "fail_silently": False,
      "pipeline": [
        "platform_plugin_forum_email_notifier.extensions.filters.AddInstructorNotifierTab",
      ]
  },
}

Getting Started

Developing

One Time Setup

# Clone the repository
git clone git@github.com:eduNEXT/platform_plugin_forum_email_notifier.git
cd platform_plugin_forum_email_notifier

# Set up a virtualenv with the same name as the repo and activate it
# Here's how you might do that if you have virtualenvwrapper setup.
mkvirtualenv -p python3.8 platform_plugin_forum_email_notifier

Every time you develop something in this repo

# Activate the virtualenv
# Here's how you might do that if you're using virtualenvwrapper.
workon platform_plugin_forum_email_notifier

# Grab the latest code
git checkout main
git pull

# Install/update the dev requirements
make requirements

# Run the tests and quality checks (to verify the status before you make any changes)
make validate

# Make a new branch for your changes
git checkout -b <your_github_username>/<short_description>

# Using your favorite editor, edit the code to make your change.
vim ...

# Run your new tests
pytest ./path/to/new/tests

# Run all the tests and quality checks
make validate

# Commit all your changes
git commit ...
git push

# Open a PR and ask for review.

Deploying

Tutor environments

To use this plugin in a Tutor environment, you must install it as a requirement of the openedx image. To achieve this, follow these steps:

tutor config save --append OPENEDX_EXTRA_PIP_REQUIREMENTS=git+https://github.com/edunext/platform-plugin-forum-email-notifier@vX.Y.Z
tutor images build openedx

Then, deploy the resultant image in your environment.

The email digest feature accumulates the notifications in a database table per user, per course, and digest frequency. Then, a scheduled task is run to send the notifications to the users.

As Open edX doesn't support Celery Beat for scheduled tasks, we need to use another tool to run them.

For Tutor local installations, we must use cron to run the scheduled tasks.

An example of a cron expression to run the scheduled tasks once every day at midnight:

0 0 * * * /bin/bash -l -c 'tutor local exec lms ./manage.py lms forum_digest --digest daily'

For tutor k8s installations we need to use a cronjob to run the scheduled tasks. The default cronjob is configured to run the scheduled tasks once every day at midnight and can be found in the folder tutor-plugins. It's compatible with the Open edX release olive and can be modified to work with other later releases.

License

The code in this repository is licensed under the AGPL 3.0 unless otherwise noted.

Please see LICENSE.txt 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. Please email security@edunext.co.