New edX entry point: adding new course tabs

[Andy Armstrong]

As part of our long term plan to make Open edX more extensible, we are introducing the ability to register new types of course tabs. A recent example would be the Student Notes feature, which when enabled adds a "Notes" tab to the student's courseware. Prior to this change, introducing a new tab required a complex and error prone set of changes in multiple files in the edX platform. Once this entry point has been released and documented, any installed Python library can provide a new tab by simply declaring an entry point in its setup.py.

I have created a draft document describing how such tabs will be added to the platform:

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/AC/Adding+a+new+course+tab

I've also created a new wiki page that enumerates the current set of extension points:

https://openedx.atlassian.net/wiki/display/AC/Extending+edX+Platform

Please let me know if you have any feedback on this particular extension, or on the general approach that we are taking to support edX platform extensions.

Thanks,

 - Andy

--

Andy Armstrong

edX | UI Architect  | an...@edx.org  

141 Portland Street, 9th floor

Cambridge, MA 02139

http://www.edx.org

[Andy Armstrong]

Thanks for the feedback on this new entry point. This work has now been merged to master, and will be available in the upcoming Open edX Cypress release.

As always, let us know if you have any concerns.

 - Andy

[Andy Armstrong]

Hi Brenth,

This feature is now on master, but it is not available in the Birch release. It is possible that you could cherry-pick the changes into your own fork, but a lot of features have been working on course tabs recently, so it may not be straightforward. I'd suggest waiting until the Cypress release which is due in July.

Feel free to contact me privately if you want help getting this running on your own fork.

Thanks,

 - Andy

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 10:30 PM, brenth miras <brenth...@gmail.com> wrote:

Can this be implemented already in the current release of edx platform?

[brenth miras]

Hi Andy,

This feature is great. I followed the instructions on your link on creating a feature as a separate django app and it's awesome. However I'm having problems making the course tab. What I did is I created a setup.py under my app and created the provided entry point. I don't have any Idea where I should create the new tab class and of course where the CourseTab class should be imported from. Please help me on this. Thank you.

-Brenth

[Mohammad Soori]

I need to add a new tab in order to create an online chat (support) for students. Actually, in my template, I just call a specific javascript tag. I need a simple tutorial on how to create this tab. I followed the provided example, but I didn't achieve any success. I also tried to follow this link, it wasn't successful too.

Any advice would be appreciated.