“After a lot of work hammering out the last few issues, Cypress is ready to go!”
With this revealing announcement on the General Open edX discussion forum on Google Groups, David Baumgold, edX’s engineer in charge of the release, broke the news.
An official blog post on the Open edX portal, written by Sarina Canelake, explained that this third release of Open edX is “absolutely jam packed with new features and improvements” (see below) and “strongly encouraged everyone in the Open edX community to begin their upgrade to Cypress immediately“, revealing that “Cypress is now the only supported Open edX release” and “security patches will no longer be released for Birch”.
This Cypress-named release added around 188,500 lines of code and removed around 46,000 lines, touching nearly 2,500 files in the process. Seventy individuals, along with many other contributors, have been involved in writing the code of the edX platform since the release of Birch in February 2015. In total, over 3,150 commits.
Among the new features:
- OLI Hinting
- Creative Commons
- Polling and Survey XBlocks
- Learner Profiles
- Course Search
- Randomized Content Blocks
- Single Sign On (SSO)
- Performance improvements
- Security and stability fixes
A full list of features has been posted here, along with instructions to migrate to Cypress.
The next Open edX release, Dogwood, is expected for the end of November 2015.
