Integrating Wordpress and the Open edX platform as an alternative to e-commerce

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Time: April 28, 2022 at 1:00pm, Room -112

Presenter: Andres Gonzalvez, Aulaseo (Argentina)

Talk

• Motivations

  • Business case for learner certificates

  • Support for more payment gateways

    • More regulations

    • More providers

  • Support for bank transfers (more popular in Latin America)

  • Multiple payment gateway offerings depending on country and currency

  • Multitenancy

  • Design flexibility & better integration with marketing site

  • Course bundling, discounts, coupons, special offers

  • Selling other products & services (books, etc.)

  • Deprecation of ecommerce

• Why is ecommerce difficult?

  • A lot of business logic due to payment rules

• Architecture

  • Wordpress + Woocommerce

  • Amazon API Gateway + Lambda Functions

  • Open edX Installation

• Setup

  • Enable REST API client and create products in Wordpress

  • Add OAuth2 in LMS

  • Requires adding Bulk Enrollment in API

• Example Cases

  • Happy Path: Woocommerce New Order Webhook → Woocommerce REST API to LMS to Enroll → Woocommerce Order Complete Webook

    • Woocommerce New Order Webhook

      • Woocommerce sends JSON that includes user email, SKU, and course id

    • Woocommerce REST API to LMS to Enroll

      • Uses GitHub - aulasneo/openedx-rest-api-client

        • Simplified version of Opencraft’s openedx_client

        • list_all_courses and change_enrollment

    • Woocommerce REST API (polls?) LMS for Status Update

  • Manual Payment Confirmation: Send confirmation link to institution that will confirm payment has arrived in institution’s bank account (1 email per transaction). Add AWS RDS & SES.

  • Multisite/Multi-LMS. Can support multiple Woocommerce & Open edX installations to route requests using Amazon API Gateway.

  • Also integrated with AWS CloudWatch for logs, AWS Secrets Manager, and the AulasNeo Panorama frontend

• Future

  • Improve REST API client to support more functions that is lightweight.

  • Manage cancellations and refunds

  • Dynamic product configuration from courses status (enrollment quotas, dates, course title, code descriptions, and image, student progress)

  • Sell upgrades (course modes), not only enrollments

  • Programs with complex course interdependencies

  • Subscriptions

  • Develop a framework to easily connect any ecommerce application to any Open edX installation

Audience Questions

• Florian Haas, Cleura: Woocommerce custom line items for people purchasing for others. Also uses Shopify. Does not use AWS, uses a simple Django project instead.

• Andres: Does not have a user in Wordpress.

• Audience member: Uses Ecommerce - wonders how coupons work.

  • Andres: Woocommerce supports coupons.

• Audience member: Common problem is incorrect emails. Purchaser email not the same as user email.

• Andrews: Syncing Woocommerce and Open edX (e.g. disabled users) can be tricky