[DEPR]: Studio Maintenance & Announcements Dashboard #36263

Please first read the parent DEPR ticket, [DEPR]: All Legacy Studio Frontends.

RFC Start Date

2025-02-19

Target Plan Accepted Date

2025-03-05

Target Transition Unblocked Date

No replacement guaranteed.

Earliest Breaking Changes Unblocked Date

2025-09-14

Earliest Open edX Named Release with Breaking Changes

Ulmo - 2025-10

Rationale

The Announcements tool is the only remaining tool in the Studio Maintenance dashboard (pictured below), which is one of the very few remaining legacy Studio frontends. To access it, go to Studio, your username in the top-right corner, and select "Maintenance":

The feature is very barebones. The announcements can only be created by org-wide staff, and they are only visible in one place (the legacy learner dashboard). The support a very limited amount of formatting, and the formatting does not always render very well (see below). They are visible to all users; no filtering or targeting is available.

By default, the announcements render nowhere. When FEATURES['ENABLE_ANNOUNCEMENTS'] is toggled on, they will render only on the legacy learner dashboard, (which is already deprecated, and can only be accessed by disabling the learner_home_mfe.enabled Waffle flag). The announcements do not render robustly or reactively; for example, see how an image within an announcement will overflow rather than resize:

In additional to the issues mentioned above, the feature is undocumented. Furthermore, it is is partially redundant: Site-wide announcements can also be served by the global status announcements app (/admin/status/globalstatusmessage/), (although those are also bare-bones and do not render in all the places that site operator might want them to).

Removing the Announcements tool will unblock us from entirely removing the legacy Studio frontend, which will significantly reduce maintenance burden, confusion, repeated work, and toil for edx-platform contributors.

Replacement

OpenCraft (@Agrendalath ) has tentatively volunteered to either (a) port the Announcement editor to frontend-app-authoring, or (b) merge the feature with one of the other announcement mechanisms in the platform.

However, we will remove this frontend as early as August 2025, regardless of whether a replacement has been added.

Removal

• The Studio Maintenance dashboard and the Edit Announcements frontends will both be removed from edx-platform.
• The "Maintenance" link will be removed from the Studio header(s).
• FEATURES['ENABLE_ANNOUNCEMENTS'] will be removed.
• Unless it is used by the replacement ,openedx/features/announcements and its models will be removed.

Deprecation

We will ensure that the deprecation is noted in the Ulmo release notes. No code-level deprecation warnings will be raised.

Migration

N/A

Additional Info

Just to clarify any potential confusion: This feature was actually already removed because we thought it was unused. When a community member pointed out that the feature was in fact in use on some pages, we temporarily re-introduced it. We are now re-approaching its removal through the proper process (DEPR).

Removal Task List

• feat!: Remove Studio Maintenance link (attempt 2) frontend-component-header#642
• feat: frontend-component-header to 8.0.0, to rm Maintenance link frontend-app-authoring#2521
• feat!: Remove Studio Maintenance & Announcements #37432