Replacing the built-in Open edX forum with a suitable alternative

Posted on Thu 02 February 2017 in hints-and-kinks • 3 min read

Open edX comes with a built-in discussion forum service. Many Open edX users find this service less than optimal: it is the only edX service to require Ruby, it depends on a Ruby version that is outdated and no longer receives security updates (although a fix for that is on the way), it and generally feels like overkill to many users.

Thankfully, since the Open edX Eucalyptus release it’s been quite easy to replace the course forum with an alternative. Here at hastexo, we’re fans of Disqus (you may have noticed we also use it around out web site), so let’s see what we can do to drop the Open edX Forum and replace it with Disqus.

Step 1: Locate your course’s policy.json file

If you keep your course materials in Git or some other version-controlled repository, you’ll already be familiar with the directory structure of an OLX course tree. If you’re not, just use edX Studio to export your course into a compressed archive, download it, and extract it on your local machine.

Locate the policies/_base directory. Find the policy.json file located therein. It might look like this:

{
  "course/201702": {
    "language": "en",
    "invitation_only": true,
    "start": "2017-02-01T00:00:00Z",
    "advertised_start": "2017-02-01T00:00:00Z",
    "end": "2017-02-28T23:59:59Z",
    "is_new": true,
    "catalog_visibility": "both",
    "max_student_enrollments_allowed": null,
    "due": null,
    "giturl": null,
    "course_image": "images_course_image.jpg",
    "advanced_modules": ["hastexo"],
    "hide_from_toc": false,
    "ispublic": false,
    "rerandomize": "never",
    "show_calculator": false,
    "showanswer": "attempted",
    "days_early_for_beta": null,
    "discussion_topics": {
      "General": {
        "id": "i4x-hastexo-hx212-course-201702"
      }
    },
    "tabs": [
      {
        "name": "Courseware",
        "type": "courseware"
      },
      {
        "name": "Course Info",
        "type": "course_info"
      },
      {
        "name": "Textbooks",
        "type": "textbooks"
      },
      {
        "name": "Discussion",
        "type": "discussion"
      },
      {
        "name": "Wiki",
        "type": "wiki"
      },
      {
        "name": "Progress",
        "type": "progress"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Note the tabs list. It contains the list of course tabs (which edX Studio, confusingly, calls “pages”).

Step 2: Remove the default Discussion tab

You can now edit policy.json, and drop the Discussion entry from the tabs list, to make it look like so:

    "tabs": [
      {
        "name": "Courseware",
        "type": "courseware"
      },
      {
        "name": "Course Info",
        "type": "course_info"
      },
      {
        "name": "Textbooks",
        "type": "textbooks"
      },
      {
        "name": "Wiki",
        "type": "wiki"
      },
      {
        "name": "Progress",
        "type": "progress"
      }
    ]

Maybe you also want to remove the course wiki. Just keep whichever tabs you’d like to keep.

Step 3: Add a “static” tab

In place of the old Discussion tab (which, you may have noticed, was of a special type conspicuously named discussion), you can now put a tab of different, simpler type: static_tab. Like so:

    "tabs": [
      {
        "name": "Courseware",
        "type": "courseware"
      },
      {
        "name": "Course Info",
        "type": "course_info"
      },
      {
        "name": "Textbooks",
        "type": "textbooks"
      },
      {
        "name": "Discussion",
        "type": "static_tab",
        "url_slug": "discussion"
      },
      {
        "name": "Wiki",
        "type": "wiki"
      },
      {
        "name": "Progress",
        "type": "progress"
      }
    ]

Note that a static_tab type tab also requires a value url_slug. What’s that one about, you ask?

Step 4: add static content

Whatever you put into url_slug tells Open edX to go look into the tabs subdirectory of your course root, and find a properly named file there. In our case, that file needs to be named discussion.html, because we defined "url_slug": "discussion".

So, head over to Disqus and grab the generated code from there, and then stick it into tabs/discussion.html. Something like this:

<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
<script>// <![CDATA[
(function() { // DON'T EDIT BELOW THIS LINE
var d = document, s = d.createElement('script');
s.src = '//<your Disqus site domain name>/embed.js';
s.setAttribute('data-timestamp', +new Date());
(d.head || d.body).appendChild(s);
})();
// ]]></script>
<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="https://disqus.com/?ref_noscript">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript>
<p></p>

Step 5: deploy

Re-compress your tarball, upload to Studio or run manage.py import, and you’re done!

This article originally appeared on the hastexo.com website (now defunct).

Open edX