Customizable self-hosted course platform
Hi fellow course creators!
I'm currently working on my first course. I've been looking for a customizable platform that I can use to self-host the course on it's own domain (http://djangoplusgraphql.com/). I haven't been able to find a good solution for this yet. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I've tried a number of different solutions, but haven't come across one that I like. Platforms like Podia and Teachable don't offer enough customization and can't be self hosted. Open source platforms like OpenEDX are difficult to setup. The various Wordpress plugins I've tried seem clumsy and don't offer a great user experience. I've also noticed that a number of course creators I follow have created their own course platforms from scratch (Wes Bos, Kent C. Dodds, Refactoring UI).
My ideal platform would:
- have payment and authentication flows built in
- require no extra monthly or transaction fees
- be simple to self-host
- be fully-customizable at the code level
- be easily extensible for adding additional features
- make it simple to organize course content
I'm thinking of creating my own platform for this course, and then selling it as a template to help new course authors get up and running. If I was to do this, would any of you be interested in using it?
Hey Jayden,
Totally curious here about this:
"Platforms like Podia and Teachable don't offer enough customization"
@wesburke and @carter2422 and I are building Mavenseed (https://mavenseed.com) for this exact purpose, having spent years building courses and teaching others through CG Cookie (https://cgcookie.com)
We have a lot of updates in progress right now as we pivot to more of a CMS for content creators. I'm more curious what level of customization you're after as a user. I'm looking for feedback to make sure it aligns with what we currently have in the pipes.
Looks like an awesome product! I love the in-depth docs. More no-code products should offer documentation like this.
Ideally I'd like to host the course platform on my own servers and be able to modify the code for the course / landing page. Is this possible with Mavenseed?
Thanks Jayden!
We have a pretty slick page builder that you can use to build a variety of landing pages. I just added a few extra leafs a couple days ago.
I’m actually in the middle of adding page templates and a better set of theming options. What we’re after is a return to personalized sites in the early days like MySpace. The Internet needs more personable sites, and that’s what we’re aiming for.
But we can’t help much with the self-hosted part. I’m just curious, why do you want to self-host?
Thanks for your feedback BTW! If you want you can create a free account on Mavenseed.com and take things for a spin. If you think of anything that’s missing, just let me know. I’m the design-gineer behind the platform.
Nick — You should add IndieHackers to your list of "How did you hear about us?" when people sign up.
Good call!
Wow, very slick! I'll give it a try :)
I'd prefer to self-host it primarily so that I can modify the code when I need to. I find that when I use no-code page builders I inevitably run into situations where what I want to build isn't possible because of platform limitations, or is significantly more complex to build than it would have been to do it myself.
I'd also prefer paying a fixed cost up front for a template or tool, plus the negligible cost of hosting it myself, instead of having to pay a monthly fee or lose a high percentage of each transaction.
Got it! Thanks so much for the feedback Jayden!
I have discussed with people in the same situation, and since I see you are creating content for Django, I strongly suggest you to check Wagtail. It allows you to have very fine grained access control of groups, and thus you can use any payment processor with a callback to an endpoint you customize. For hosting the videos, Vimeo is great, and it allows you to do domain restriction, so only people on your website can watch them.
This setup is what is being used at learn pyqt (not my project) and it is what I am replicating for python for the lab. I haven't started with the course backend yet, but the current version of the website is available here.
So, Wagtail+Django Allauth+Vimeo+Payment Processor is all what you need. It would be very cool to unite forces, I'm seeing more and more people working in this direction.
Interesting. I haven't used Wagtail, but I'll have to check it out. Does it come with plug-and-play Allauth / Stripe integrations, or would I need to glue those pieces together myself?
Allauth and Wagtail are somehow made for each other. If you start with a django cookiecutter project, adding Wagtail to it will get you going very quickly. Regarding payment processors, you will need to configure the endpoints yourself. Remember that stripe offers a very powerful backend for customer management as well, and keeping those things in sync with your own backend may be a bit of a headache, tools like gumroad, fastspring, etc. perhaps are better suited (I assume you have a simple pricing strategy, etc.) to get started fast.
Hey @jaydenwindle, I've been cooking up something quite similar to what you're looking for. I have a basic course platform with payment and authentication built on top of Gatsby (React), Firebase, and Stripe. Let me know if that interests you!
This sounds awesome! Very similar to what I was planning to create myself. Sent you a DM :)
cc @ltmod @sales4nerds
This is a great question. I've been hunting for something like that myself. There's Moodle, but it feels too big and too complex. I've rolled my own as well, but that feels too light.
Have you looked at Thinkific? I think it offers everything you want although you can't get to the code level. But you can customize the way your whole site looks around the course.
I gave Thinkific a try briefly, but I wasn't a huge fan of their site editor. I'd also prefer to host the course on my own servers, which I don't believe is possible with Thinkific. Looks like a great product otherwise though! +1 for the free tier.
Following. ;-)
🙌