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/ecommerceisn’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.