The contents of your site and the way it looks are extremely important. They will help establish and promote your brand and let you deliver the exact information and graphics you need to your audience, regardless of the device they use.
As you probably know already, the Open edX platform focuses mainly in the authoring and delivery of the online courses, so it may not have enough functionality to cover your needs in terms of adjusting the branding, or publishing your marketing content and landing pages for each of your courses or programs the way you want to, or change this branding and contents easily. Sometimes even controlling what courses appear in your homepage or course catalog and in what order gets tricky.
Over the year we have dived deep into two different approaches to solve these challenges.
1. Integrating Open edX with an additional CMS platform
So that it is the CMS platform the one handling the initiative’s homepage, course catalog page, and even the course description pages. This is the kind of approach that edx.org uses for instance, which is why your Open edX platform homepage or course catalog doesn’t really resemble the ones at edx.org. At eduNEXT we have led the way in integrating the Open edX platform with the WordPress CMS, by creating the WordPress Open edX integrator plugin for WordPress and we have helped a large number of organizations integrate seamlessly and provide the best navigation experience for their learners.
2. Extending Open edX theme
To include your images and HTML contents to fit your specific needs. In case this is the path your initiative chose, you may have noticed that the theming frameworks have changed a lot over time and keeping up with such changes is a real challenge, plus the changes are done directly into the Open edX platform code, so even the smallest change requires to involve all your technical team, and perform heavy load operations that may even risk your service continuity. The great news is that eduNEXT has built a completely different approach, allowing you to customize the styles and even add you own HTML content to most of the pages in your site directly from a management console, without the need to modify the code of the platform, redeploy the applications, etc. This is what we call Configurable themes.
If you are interested in either of these approaches, we would be more than happy to share a service proposal with you, just let us know your specific needs and we’ll be glad to work alongside you to get them done.
We have devoted ourselves for more than 7 years to help our customers overcome a wide variety of challenges involving the Open edX platform including building custom themes, configurable themes, dynamic branding, integrating with CMS platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Squarespace, and others. Please follow this link to schedule a complimentary 30 minutes consultancy to discuss how we can be the technology partner that will empower you to take your online learning strategies several steps further.
