This is a modest release, with a few bug fixes and small list of relatively minor added features. See the release notes for all details.
The biggest change in 2.8 is actually a roll-back of a warning message that was added in 2.7. If you upgraded and started getting a lot of new warnings about promoted inputs that were connected in a funky way… well, we made that go away. It wasn’t helpful and we got a lot of user feedback that we shouldn’t show it by default — and we do occasionally listen to user feedback 🙂
The other change worth noting is not technically a new feature, but rather a new convention. We now recommend that users do the following to import the OpenMDAO API:
import openmdao.api as om
This is a much more compact and convenient way of handling the imports. In hindsight, this is the obvious way of doing this, but since we lack a time machine all we can do is use this better approach from now on. No need to change all your existing scripts if you don’t want to, the old way still works! We’ve updated all our docs to use it though, and we’ll use it for everything going forward.
We hope this new release is useful to you!