Richie (djangoCMS) vs edx.org (Drupal) + demo issues

Tutor
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I’m evaluating edx and running an AWS Tutor instance. I was not able to run studio on the raw IP address since it’s a subdomain. So I went back to the richie demo site. Both the sign-up and login buttons are not working so I’m unable to access admin without setting up dns.

Could you please explain or point me to the rational for building richie. My understanding is that richie is a djangoCMS for the front end, rather than using the drupal cms that is apparently the built-in and used as the edx.org site cms.

In addition to demo site login and sign up being disabled, the demo site also fails to load Courses:
https://richie.education/en/courses/?limit=999&offset=0

Thanks,
James

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Hi @jamesynotnot! I’m not in the best position to answer your questions regarding Richie, as I am not part of the developer team.

You should be able to access the admin interface at https://richie.education/admin using the demo credentials.

This is my understanding, exactly.

I have no idea what is the underlying error. AFAIK the url https://richie.education/api/v1.0/courses/?limit=999&offset=0 responds with a 500 error code.

1 Like
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Hey James,

I’m Mehdi, I work over at FUN-MOOC and am one of the primary maintainers of Richie.

It should probably be written clearly in the docs: this is by design as they’re supposed to be an OAuth provider of your choice. We’ll implement one with Open edX as a suggested default but it is not available as of now.

As Régis said, you can access the admin through the standard Django /admin/ URL.

This was a deployment issue, it should be working again now.

This is right, except that the Drupal CMS is not built-in with Open edX. It is instead a project that belongs to edX and whose code is not available.

Richie is an open source alternative built by members of the community (mostly FUN-MOOC in Paris and Edulib in Canada for now). Its focus is building a multilingual, elasticsearch powered marketing portal and course discovery tool to put in front of one or several LMS instances.

I’m happy to answer any question you may have on Richie.

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Awesome, thanks for your help - edX is a complex ecosystem, so getting my head around it:
CMS - studio, course development, open source
LMS - course management, open source
MOOC - Richie open source, multilingual, elasticsearch-powered marketing portal and course discovery, a replacement for proprietary Open edX Drupal-based system.

Using Richie:
I modified content on the home page; I have a requirement to provide courses by Locale, so I created a Locations page on the Main nav and set to use the category list template. It had no subpages.

When I previewed the page, it gave me to server error 500. It seems reasonable since there was no content, but I could not explain that to my course creators. Is this expected?

Next, I published the list page without subpages (category sub-pages) in both french and english, also got 500 errors, although all the pages published.

Then I published a category page under my Locations category list page, named Trinidad, and configured for english and french. Category page worked.

Locations page (category list) is still error 500. https://richie.education/en/locations/
Location page (category page) is working: https://richie.education/en/locations/trinidad/

My question is that I don’t see how to configure the category page in the CMS, e.g. generate the set of Beginner courses. Where do you set the parameters for the category page? In my case, I want to pull into the page the Trinidad courses.

Thanks for your help,
James

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I’m confused by the terms a bit: edX uses CMS = course management system (edX Studio, Django) and Richie uses CMS = content management system (Django CMS). The CMS for Richie is a searchable directory of courses, aggregation courses from universities, course promotion, e-commerce, such as at https://www.fun-mooc.fr/. I think I got that right.

What is the proprietary Drupal component of edX? It’s this CMS (content), right?

How does Richie interact with edX, is there an API for communication with edX CMS (course) instances? Is there a standard for course-to-content interaction?

What does Richie have that an off the shelf e-commerce system doesn’t have?

Thanks!

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I looked through the code and see that it’s a lot more than an e-commerce system, so now I get the rational for Richie. The models are simple, that’s good, and the code is ~1.4 mb, so that’s good too. :slight_smile:

Where I had problems was in Docker ‘make bootstrap’ which pulled in everything under the sun after 45 min and many gigs. Then another 30 min to install with ‘make run’ and then ‘make superuser’. (must be installing an edX too?) I logged at http://localhost:8070/ all looked good. Then I clicked an edit or create button that took me to this page:

image
image.png1581×1370 231 KB

I didn’t go to the step ‘run demo-site’. Maybe if I had it would have cleared up this problem.

It would be great to get an old fashion requirements.txt and run Richie without all the Docker apparatus. Heresy, I know. :slight_smile:

Once I have a barebones Richie I could then point it at or point an edX cms (course management system) from/to Richie cms (content management system).

I haven’t look at the APIs yet, but it appears that Richie exports APIs for search only: /src/richie/apps/search/urls.py. I also got this clue:

https://richie.education/api/v1.0/courses/?limit=999&offset=0

Thanks, apologies for the possible perceived tone of my writing; it’s true I am frustrated by all the Docker apparatus when all I want is a dev build at this point.

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More errors continuing with demo-site. I’m simply following the instructions: GitHub - openfun/richie: 📝 An opensource CMS to build education portals

docker-compose --version
docker-compose version 1.23.2, build 1110ad01
docker -v
Docker version 18.09.2, build 6247962

3936692833
39366928331095×1200 185 KB

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Operation issues mostly solved: run as sudo on macOS.

Still have questions about using Richie:
I have a requirement to provide courses by Locale, so I created a Locations page on the Main nav and set to use the category list template. It had no subpages.

When I previewed the page , it gave me to server error 500.

Next, I published the list page without subpages (category sub-pages) in both french and english, also got 500 errors, although all the pages published.

Then I published a category page under my Locations category list page, named Trinidad, and configured for english and french. Category page worked.

Locations page (category list) is still error 500. https://richie.education/en/locations/
Location page (category page) is working: https://richie.education/en/locations/trinidad/

I don’t see how to configure the category page in the CMS… e.g. where is the query that generates the set of Beginner courses… where are the parameters for the category page? In my case, I want to pull into the page the Trinidad courses.

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Hi @mbenadda
I managed to install richie in the aws instance where openedx-tutor is installed, and the demo site is now available at http://mydomain:8070 . Would you let me know how can I point my subdomain to this port ? Pardon me if it’s a very basic question- I don’t have much technical knowledge. Also let me know if any documentation is available for Richie.

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hey there @jamesynotnot any recent experiences to share from using Richie with Tutor Open edX?