Back to posts Apereo OAE Phoenix 1.1 is now available!

The Apereo Open Academic Environment (OAE) project team is pleased to announce the first minor release of the OAE Phoenix release; OAE Phoenix 1.1.

OAE Phoenix 1.1 brings a number of new features, like LDAP authentication and new UI translations, a number of end-user improvements and improvements to OAE's ease of deployment and development. However, OAE Phoenix 1.1 is mostly a technical release, with lots of work going on in the background around performance testing and automated UI testing.

The first OAE production environment has also been set up and launched, and currently supports 3 institutions on a single instance. All tenants have been skinned, and most of the configuration has taken place, with 2 tenants using Shibboleth authentication and 1 tenant using CAS authentication:

• Georgia Tech: https://oae.gatech.edu
• Marist College: https://marist.oaeproject.org
• University of Cambridge: https://collab.lib.cam.ac.uk

This production environment has been updated to run the OAE Phoenix 1.1 release.

Try it out

The source code has been tagged with version number 0.2.1 and can be downloaded from the following repositories:

Back-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/tree/0.2.1
Front-end: https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/tree/0.2.1

Documentation on how to install the system can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/Hilary/blob/0.2.1/README.md.

The repository containing all deployment scripts can be found at https://github.com/oaeproject/puppet-hilary.

Changelog

LDAP authentication

It is now possible to authenticate against an LDAP server and pull the user's pull basic profile information from LDAP. All of this can be configured and mapped on the fly through the Administration UI.

UI translations

• A full Polish translation for OAE is now available (thanks to Katarzyna Napiórkowska)
• A full Italian translation for OAE is now available (thanks to Renato Strazzulla and Toni Devís López)
• A full Valencian translation for OAE is now available (thanks to Toni Devís López)
• The French OAE translation is back at 100% completeness (thanks to Frederic Dooremont)
• The German OAE translation is back at 100% completeness (thanks to Yildiray Ogurol)
• OAE now has a more complete Dutch translation (thanks to Mark Breuker)
• OAE now has a more complete Spanish translation (thanks to Samuel Gutiérrez Jiménez-Peña and Toni Devís López)

Discussion email notifications

Email notifications are now being sent for important discussion activities, like someone sharing a discussion with you, someone posting in a discussion you manage or you participated in, etc.

Activity for restored revisions

Restoring a content or document revision now generates an activity in the activity feed.

Automated testing improvements

The following QUnit tests have been added to the User Interface, although more work will be going into these during the next release:

• Test that checks for code and styling issues in the JavaScript (using JSHint)
• Test that checks for any translation keys in the various bundles that are no longer being used
• Test that checks for any translation keys in the HTML and JavaScript that have not been translated
• Test that checks for translation keys that have been duplicated inside a bundle or across widget bundles
• Test that checks for hard-coded English strings that have not been internationalized
• Test that checks that all CSS is in line with the project's style guide
• Test that checks that all JavaScript is in line with the project's style guide
• Test that checks for WCAG 2.0 Compliance - 1.1.1 Non-text Content / Text Alternatives issues
• Test that checks the completeness of each available translation (limited to core bundles only)

Important work has gone into building out a set of automated functional UI tests. This is currently still in development and expected to be included in the next release.

The project's performance tests have also been significantly updated to reflect the latest state of the UI. This work is available athttps://github.com/oaeproject/node-oae-tsung.

Ease of development

A number of issues that showed up when deploying and developing OAE on Windows have been addressed, making it more straightforward to get the system up and running on Windows.

Multiple improvements have also been made to the project's installation guide.

Performance improvements

The revisions feed for collaborative documents has been made more scalable, with the revision content being available on the individual revisions now instead of the global revision overview feed.

Production improvements

Improvements have been made to the re-index all operation, including the ability to re-index all discussions in the system.

Improvements have also been made to the re-generate previews operation, including supporting the re-generation of previews for individual content items.

It is now also possible for global and tenant admins to see the group members of all groups

Get in touch

The project website can be found at http://www.oaeproject.org. The project blog will be updated with the latest project news from time to time, and can be found at http://www.oaeproject.org/blog.

The mailing list used for Apereo OAE is oae-dev@collab.sakaiproject.org. You can subscribe to the mailing list at http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/oae-dev.

Bugs and other issues can be reported in our issue tracker at https://github.com/oaeproject/3akai-ux/issues.