Forum plugin for Tutor

This plugin adds discussion forums to your Open edX platform, such that students can have conversations about the courses they are following right in your LMS.

Installation

tutor plugins install forum

Upgrading from Redwood (v18)

In the Sumac release, this plugin was updated to run the new openedx/forum Python application ("v2") instead of the legacy cs_comments_service Ruby application ("v1"). See this deprecation announcement for more information.

In Sumac, forum v2 supported both MongoDB and MySQL as data storage backends. Starting with openedx/forum 0.4.3, the MongoDB backend was removed and MySQL is the only supported backend.

If you are running an existing platform on the MongoDB backend, you must migrate your data to MySQL before upgrading. Migrate your data with:

tutor local run lms ./manage.py lms forum_migrate_course_from_mongodb_to_mysql all

This command is non-destructive for your data, and can be run multiple times with the same outcome. Once you are sufficiently confident that the MongoDB data is no longer necessary, you may delete it with:

tutor local run lms ./manage.py lms forum_delete_course_from_mongodb all

For a more progressive transition, you may decide to migrate data for a single course:

tutor local run lms ./manage.py lms forum_migrate_course_from_mongodb_to_mysql <course ID>
# deleting data is optional and should be done only if you are confident that the migration was successful
tutor local run lms ./manage.py lms forum_delete_course_from_mongodb <course ID>

For more information, check out the documentation of the forum application.

Breaking Changes

As part of the Sumac major release, the following MongoDB-related configuration were removed from this plugin:

• FORUM_MONGODB_DATABASE (default: cs_comments_service)
• FORUM_MONGODB_USE_SSL (default: False)
• FORUM_MONGODB_AUTH_SOURCE (default: "")
• FORUM_MONGODB_AUTH_MECH (default: "")
• FORUM_PORT (default: "4567")
• FORUM_API_KEY (default: "forumapikey")
• FORUM_REPOSITORY (default: https://github.com/openedx/cs_comments_service.git)
• FORUM_REPOSITORY_VERSION (default: {{ OPENEDX_COMMON_VERSION }})

These configurable parameters were deprecated in sumac upgrade when openedx forum was made default in tutor-forum. Prior to v19 sumac release, if an operator using this plugin had customized the above listed configurations, they will not be able to customize these values with tutor config save --set after v19 sumac release. To customize the deprecated mongo params, openedx-common-settings patch should be used. See below for an example using this patch in a custom plugin:

tutor_hooks.Filters.ENV_PATCHES.add_item(
  (
      "openedx-common-settings",  """
         FORUM_MONGODB_DATABASE = 'your_custom_name',
   """
  )
)

Usage

tutor plugins enable forum
tutor dev|local|k8s launch

Debugging

To debug the forum application, you are encouraged to mount the forum repository from the host in the development container:

tutor mounts add /path/to/forum
tutor dev launch

Troubleshooting

This Tutor plugin is maintained by Abdul-Muqadim (abdul.muqadim@arbisoft.com). Community support is available from the official Open edX forum. Do you need help with this plugin? See the troubleshooting section from the Tutor documentation.

License

This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).