fix: Remove pointless Maintenance and Announcement apps

[kdmccormick]

Description

The Studio Maintenance app had two features:

• "Force Course Publish", which literally doesn't do anything. All it does is tell you what version would be seen by users if the course were to be published--no publishing actually occurs via this feature.

• "Announcements", which writes to the announcements_announcement database table, but doesn't actually display anywhere.

Having these pages in the platform is actively misleading and creates a maintenance burden for edx-platform developers, so this commit removes them.

Note that this commit does not include a migration for the announcements Django app. So, announcements_announcement table will not be deleted. Given the small expected size of any past-authored announcements, we are not worried about leaving them in the database perpetually. (REVIEWERS: Let me know if you disagree with this.)

Testing Instructions

None

Merge considerations

Blocked by:

• fix: Remove Studio Maintenance link frontend-component-header#553
  • And upgrading that package in frontend-app-authoring

Other cleanup (non-blocking):

• refactor: remove pointless maintenance link message frontend-app-authoring#1503

Supporting Info: Screenshots of the platform without this PR

Maintenance link in the Studio header

The "Maintenance Dashboard"

"Force Publish Course" not doing anything other than a dry run

"Announcements" that do not show up anywhere

Not even in the deprecated frontends!

[edx-pipeline-bot]

2U Release Notice: This PR has been deployed to the edX staging environment in preparation for a release to production.

[edx-pipeline-bot]

2U Release Notice: This PR has been deployed to the edX production environment.

[Agrendalath]

@kdmccormick, @feanil,

"Announcements", which writes to the announcements_announcement database table, but doesn't actually display anywhere.

The announcements are still displayed on the legacy dashboard when the settings.FEATURES['ENABLE_ANNOUNCEMENTS'] is True:

Is there any existing alternative for displaying announcements to the learners in the Learner Dashboard MFE? If not, we could work on porting this solution to the MFE, as we still use this feature.

[kdmccormick]

Oh wow, I can't believe I missed that reference to the Announcements app 🤦🏻 Let me investigate alternatives.

In the mean time, could you help me understand OC's usage of the feature? Only site-wide admins can add these messages, correct?

[kdmccormick]

@Agrendalath Friendly reminder on my question ^

[Agrendalath]

@kdmccormick, sorry for missing your previous message. We use the announcements to provide general information for new learners, such as external links to the learning materials that are universal for the whole instance.
We have also recently considered using them for platform-wide notifications before upgrading one of our instances, but we went with the global status messages instead (/admin/status/globalstatusmessage/). This feature is also supported only on legacy pages (including the rendered XBlocks within the Learning MFE). If any of these two features were to be ported to the MFEs, we could consider merging the common.djangoapps.status and openedx.features.announcements apps to make the messages/announcements easier for site operators to manage (and to simplify the codebase).

[kdmccormick]

@Agrendalath Got it. Aside from the lack of Studio UI for adding messages, it seems like the status app is a much more flexible than the announcement app was; do you agree? If so, it would be fantastic if you were able to merge or migrate the tables from announcements into status. We could go about seeing if there are any community resources to implement status message in the Learning MFE.

If the merge/migration is a viable path forward that we could achieve by the Teak cut, then would you need this PR reverted, or could we leave announcements removed?

[Agrendalath]

@kdmccormick, I agree - it sounds like a reasonable path for merging these two features.

If the merge/migration is a viable path forward that we could achieve by the Teak cut, then would you need this PR reverted, or could we leave announcements removed?

We are still using the legacy pages for the Learner Dashboard and Studio, so we would need to revert at least a part of this PR unless we plan to implement it in both the Learning/Authoring MFE and legacy pages. We could help with the implementation using the CC hours.

[kdmccormick]

@Agrendalath I just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly--please tell me if I'm not.

We are still using the legacy pages for the Learner Dashboard and Studio, so we would need to revert at least a part of this PR unless we plan to implement it in both the Learning/Authoring MFE and legacy pages.

Here "it" means the status app, correct? And you are saying that the status app currently displays on MFE pages, but not on the learning iframe, nor in legacy Studio? Therefore, in order to keep announcements deleted, you would need the status app to be retrofitted to work on those django-rendered views?

Assuming I am correct... we certainly should implement status in the iframe, since that view will likely remain supported forever (I don't even consider it "legacy"). Studio is another story, though. What legacy Studio page do you expect to need to run in Teak? Just the course unit editor, or are there others too?

[Agrendalath]

@kdmccormick,

Here "it" means the status app, correct?

Therefore, in order to keep announcements deleted, you would need the status app to be retrofitted to work on those django-rendered views?

I was referring to the announcements, so this depends on whether we can merge them with status before Teak. What we need to bring back is the template that renders them on the legacy learner dashboard and some way for the staff to edit them.

And you are saying that the status app currently displays on MFE pages, but not on the learning iframe, nor in legacy Studio?

On the contrary - It's displayed on the legacy pages (at least in LMS; I haven't checked Studio) and in the learning iframe. We don't need to do anything for the status to be displayed in the legacy experience. However, we probably want to display it at the top of the Learner Dashboard and Learning MFE instead of showing it in the learning iframe, as it looks a bit odd there.

Studio is another story, though.

By supporting it in Studio, I only meant having any way to edit the status messages and announcements from there. With the "Edit Announcements" removed, there is currently no way to edit the announcements (if I see correctly, they did not have a page in Django admin).

What legacy Studio page do you expect to need to run in Teak? Just the course unit editor, or are there others too?

It will likely be either all available ones or none (depending on the client's QA), so it's a bit too early to predict this. In Redwood, we ran into a few generic errors without any error messages or tracebacks, so we didn't switch then (except for the Pages & Resources page).

[kdmccormick]

WIP reverts:

• revert: fix: Remove pointless Maintenance and Announcement apps #36107
• revert: fix: Remove Studio Maintenance link frontend-component-header#565 (will need to be bumped in frontend-app-authoring too)
• revert: refactor: remove pointless maintenance link message frontend-app-authoring#1592

[kdmccormick]

Thanks for explaining @Agrendalath . I've begun the revert process for these PRs. I'm excited and appreciative that OC is willing to merge the apps, and I'm eager to re-remove these legacy frontends as soon as possible.

What we need to bring back is the template that renders them on the legacy learner dashboard

OK.

and some way for the staff to edit them
...
By supporting it in Studio, I only meant having any way to edit the status messages and announcements from there. With the "Edit Announcements" removed, there is currently no way to edit the announcements (if I see correctly, they did not have a page in Django admin).

These two statements refer to the same need, right?

By "staff" do you mean global staff or course staff? I was under the impression that only global staff could edit maintenance announcements.

What sort of replacment editor do you feel is needed? Is Django admin sufficient, or do we need to build this into a react view on frontend-app-authoring?

However, we probably want to display it at the top of the Learner Dashboard and Learning MFE instead of showing it in the learning iframe, as it looks a bit odd there.

Agreed!