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.

For data storage, forum v2 can use either MongoDB or MySQL as a data storage backend:

• New users running Open edX for the first time in Sumac (Tutor v19) will default to the MySQL backend.
• Existing platforms running Redwood or earlier (Tutor < v19) will keep using the MongoDB backend by default.

If you are running an existing platform, you are strongly encouraged to migrate to the new MySQL backend, as the MongoDB backend will disappear in Teak. To do so, you should start by migrating your data:

tutor local run lms ./manage.py lms forum_migrate_course_from_mongodb_to_mysql --no-toggle all

This command is non-destructive for your data, and can be run multiple times with the same outcome. Once the data migration is successful, you should enable the forum_v2.enable_mysql_backend global course waffle flag:

./manage.py lms waffle_flag --create --everyone forum_v2.enable_mysql_backend

The forum will then make use of data stored in MySQL instead of MongoDB. Once you are sufficiently confident that the MongoDB data is no longer necessary, you may delete it with:

./manage.py lms forum_delete_course_from_mongodb all

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

# removing the no-toggle option will automatically create the course waffle flag just for this 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
./manage.py lms forum_delete_course_from_mongodb <course ID>

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

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 Ghassan Maslamani from Abstract-Technology. 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).