Hello everyone! tCRIL is pleased to announce a new contribution project to help advance the Open edX platform. This project aims to do some discovery and build a reference implementation for integration the Open edX platform with WooCommerce as the commerce system. We are seeking proposals from existing community members as well as qualified organizations looking for a first project to join the community. All proposals from providers interested in undertaking this work must be submitted by March 6th, 2023 and tCRIL expects to choose a provider by March 15th, 2023.
The Open edX community currently uses the ecommerce repo to manage commerce related tasks. However that repo is in the process of being deprecated. 2U is currently building a next generation commerce platform (commerce-coordinator) that is extensible and pluggable. However this platform may be more complex and require more technical capabilities than all operators have. We want to see what it would look like to try to integrate the Open edX platform directly with a 3rd party commerce platform that we do not need to maintain. Is there a possibility that we can have a simple implementation that will work for smaller deployments that would complement commerce-coordinator for larger deployments?
We’ll be looking for proposals that have a strong understanding of the current commerce capabilities and plugin infrastructure of the platform. Price, timeline, and a proven ability to work with the Open edX code base will also be important factors in our decision.
Details on the selection and project status, as well as a draft Statement of Work explaining the proposed project in more detail, are located at FC-0015 WooCommerce Discovery . The draft Statement of Work can (and will) be amended as conversations with the providers unfold but should be considered the most authoritative source of what we are looking for from these proposals.
Please send all proposals to funded-contributions@tcril.org and cc myself at feanil at tcril.org . Feel free to contact me with any questions on Slack at @feanil or comment here.
We are looking forward to your questions and proposals!
Hello! I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to let you know that the eduNEXT team has the first draft of the WooCommerce Integration Discovery document, and we would like to hear your opinion on it. You can leave your feedback as comments in the document or through the ecommerce slack channel.
Thanks @feanil, @mafermazu and others for this contribution.
This thread is old, but I suppose we can still reply to it.
@mafermazu and I have chatted in the conference and I think there’s a good feedback to share: I think there’s a much bigger need in the community to enable pay-to-enroll feature as either a plugin or a dedicated service without providing the full eCommerce features. This will help to increase the Open edX adoption for smaller deployments. I’m currently recommending the GitHub - hastexo/webhook-receiver: A Django application that listens for incoming webhooks, and translates them into Open edX REST API requests as a pay-to-enroll solution. As a start, I think we as a community should start providing a more tailored recommendation instead of recommending the WooCommerce integration for everyone.
In many instances we find that it’s difficult to justify installing WordPress alongside Open edX just to enable payments. WordPress is good, but it uses a different technology stack and some teams (like mine) lacks PHP expertise.
I’m saying this while I realize the following:
eCommerce is much more than payments.
WordPress and WooCommerce is a hugely popular and solid solution while also relatively approachable when compared to Magento and other alternatives.
openedx/ecommerce isn’t perfect either and has many issues which ultimately led to its deprecation and even interested providers like ourselves think it’s not a good bet to keep it alive.
To conclude, I’m sure the WooCommerce comes with many many integrated solutions and it’s a good bet to improve the Open edX opensource ecommerce solutions but it’s way too complicated for smaller instances esp. due to the technology difference. Smaller installations might use a Shopify frontend as the both Open edX ecommernce and marketing site frontends, therefore lighter solutions are needed.
ecommerce deprecation should be carried on, if for nothing, the benefit of de-coupling LMS from ecommerce-specific code is a big plus.
I’ve tried this e-commerce recently. There are a few things that prevented me from using it.
It’s a completely independent website (different database, backend, users, login, theme), and it makes users confused because it is completely independent of the LMS, mobile apps, so it might make users feel like it is a scam site, also other people can make a scam site just by doing it.
There is no redirection between this e-commerce site and LMS, mobile app, also iOS requires you to enable Apple Pay (in-app) to do e-commerce on their platform.
While Woo-commerce is famous for its plugin, actually I checked local payment gateways they are not that good, often implemented by random people on the internet, and sometimes even require you to download third-party apps to do authentication.
Last point, it’s just me having a bad experience with Wordpress, we had 2 websites using Wordpress and they were both hacked.
So it can be an additional site to sell courses (which I’m not interested in because of the above reasons). But if it’s a replacement for the whole e-commerce system (hmm…), I prefer to stay with the old one.
I want to add that the Open edX Commerce (WordPress Plugin) is just an option. The idea comes from having a third-party e-commerce service (easy to maintain), extensible and with an easy configuration process.
But if that option doesn’t work for you, it’s okay; we need to implement improvements in the actual options or figure out more options to meet the minimum expectations of an e-commerce service replacement. It doesn’t need to be one perfect option.
The problem with the old e-commerce is that it is difficult to maintain and generates several issues; right now, it is under-maintained.
It would be helpful to share other proposals that fit your use case, such as the webhook app @omar shares.
If you have other options, please share them with the community.
It’ll be a huge feat, but in general we need three things to make ecommerce more approachable in Open edX:
Fully deprecate the ecommerce and remove its leftovers from the Open edX platform including things like Orders MFE and others.
Promote (or sponsor) a lightweight pay-to-enroll solution to support providers like Stripe, Shopify and/or Paypal.
Develop hooks and filters to support full ecommerce integration to bring back the Orders, Payments features for those who want to have a full ecommerce solution. (Long term).
So it can be an additional site to sell courses (which I’m not interested in because of the above reasons). But if it’s a replacement for the whole e-commerce system (hmm…), I prefer to stay with the old one.
It’s not you. WordPress is so famous that it’s very hard to get its security right and very easy for attackers/hackers to break your site. That has been my experience so far as well, which means running a WordPress site should be done by an experienced professional.
That’s the default option for everyone, but no one (including my team) is willing to take ownership and maintain eCommerce. It’s very expensive just to keep it alive.
I don’t see it mentioned in the forums or the wiki, so dropping a note that https://saleor.io/ (GitHub - saleor/saleor: Saleor Core: the high performance, composable, headless commerce API.) is available as an alternate open source Django-native commerce solution that’s pretty popular. 2U briefly considered it for its new ecommerce solution, but it made more sense to leverage the proprietary in-house commerce engine that was already being used for other parts of the business. Saleor isn’t exactly a lightweight solution, but it seems to be better designed and maintained than django-oscar, and it can be run as either self-hosted or a paid cloud offering.
I’m wondering if that latter option is realistically the most practical “simple” option for most small-ish Open edX sites that need pay-to-enroll. PHP/Wordpress is particularly bad, but really any self-hosted ecommerce system is going to be tough for most people to run in a properly secure manner. And the organizations that can do so and want to avoid the external dependency/subscription cost can run it themselves; it’s probably even doable to implement that as a Tutor plugin.
Hi all!
We had an original proposal to build a lightweight e-commerce integration, based on an Open edX plugin that exposes an API that takes incoming orders and processes enrollments; finally returning a callback to inform the originating application that the order is completed.
We actually implement this approach for our customers and it’s been working for years. There is a video from Lisbon 2022 explaining it in detail.
It allows seamless integration with Wordpress without any WP plugin (just using Woocommerce native hooks and REST API). Potentially it could be connected to any other e-commerce app using the same idea, just mapping fields.
Our implementation is done using AWS resources, but we could convert it to an Open edX plugin. If by chance the FC e-commerce discovery is re-opened, we would be happy to present the project again.
I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to let you know that the eduNEXT team has the first draft of the