Hi Matjaz, Thanks for your feedback on Tahoe, our new SaaS offering of Open edX. We built Tahoe to eliminate the 3 pain points that we've seen with organizations trying to adopt Open edX:
1) Difficulties with hosting and getting Open edX running in a production environment 2) Difficulties with theming Open edX to match your organization's brand 3) Difficulties keeping up-to-date with the latest security patches and Open edX upgrades With Tahoe, we've eliminated these 3 pain points by providing a turnkey service that makes it point-n-click easy to theme an Open edX site in minutes, backed by scalable and reliable hosting, ongoing maintenance and professional support. https://appsembler.com/tahoe I think Open edX in its current form is still too immature for the mainstream markets <http://readwrite.com/2007/08/06/rethinking_crossing_the_chasm/> and it's only the innovators and early adopters who are willing to take a risk and have the financial resources to do so. Our hope is that Tahoe will attract newcomers to the Open edX community who wouldn't otherwise be able to adopt it due to its technical complexity and the cost associated with that complexity. As a more mainstream audience starts using Open edX and influencing the product's direction, this will in turn make the software more mature and therefore attract even more organizations to use and adopt Open edX. To answer your question about open sourcing the core technologies, the answer is that we intend to open source the theming engine, once we've cleaned it up and made it suitable for public consumption. Right now, it's very Appsembler-specific, but you can see the basic architecture of how it works for customer themes in our edx-customer-themes repo. https://github.com/appsembler/edx-theme-customers/blob/ficus/amc/lms/templates/theme-variables.html You can also read more about the reasons we built this theming engine rather than using the default way of theming in this blog post: http://appsembler.com/blog/open-edx-theming/ Tahoe makes heavy use of the Django sites and site configuration capabilities (formerly known as microsites) and we've extended these APIs with some of our own to support the theming and site configuration tools. You can see all of the changes we made in our forked edx-platform repo. https://github.com/appsembler/edx-platform/tree/appsembler/amc/master If these are useful to the rest of the community, we'd be happy to work with edX maintainers to get these pushed upstream and merged with the core. We'd certainly welcome more contributors to these APIs! Appsembler has been a long-time contributor to Open edX and is committed to contributing bug fixes and features back to the platform. Most recently we've contributed a lot of fixes for the iOS mobile app. We've been less active contributing edx-platform fixes, but our engineering team has a goal of making a more concerted effort to push improvements upstream, so that others in the community can benefit from them. Happy to answer any other questions about Tahoe and the underlying technologies that are used to provide the service! And eager to continue the conversation at the conference too! Nate On Friday, May 19, 2017 at 6:06:19 PM UTC+2, Matjaz Gregoric wrote: > > I learned about the new Tahoe SASS offering from Appsembler in a recent > blog post on the Open edX blog ( > https://open.edx.org/blog/spotlight-appsembler-keystone-sponsor-openedx2017). > The videos look very impressive, especially the theming part! > > Since we've been looking into ways to simplify creating and maintaining > simple edX LMS themes at OpenCraft, I'm wondering whether any part of the > Tahoe theming system has been upstreamed or is open sourced? > > If not, does edX have any plans to implement something similar or at least > make it easier to modify certain parts of the layout without having to > override a bunch of mako templates? > > -- > Matjaz > @OpenCraft > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "General Open edX discussion" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/edx-code/1c0414bc-21ee-4bab-bea3-956c3c269e2a%40googlegroups.com.
