WordPress is a great solution for adding marketing and e-commerce functionality to your Open edX project. See how you can also leverage WordPress as an upstream oAuth provider to your Open edX installation.

Note: Source Code for this tutorial is available “here“.

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I’m a big advocate of leveraging WordPress as a marketing front end for Open edX; even more so if you need e-commerce for monetizing your course content. But did you know that you can also configure your WordPress site as an upstream oAuth provider for your Open edX installation? This makes a lot of sense if you’d prefer to manage your user account life cycle outside of Open edX, which would be a sensible goal for a lot of reasons.

My colleague Clifford Okorie and I explain how to set this up in the YouTube video below.

Open edX provides an excellent set of built-in libraries for setting up third party authentication, which you’ll find here and you can use this code to fairly easily add common functionality such as “Sign in with Facebook”, “Sign in with Google”, etcetera. As it happens, the code in edx-platform is actually just a high level wrapper around a popular Python library named Python Social Auth which implements most of the actual authentication protocols that Open edX software supports; oAuth in our case.

I published a PyPi package, edx-oauth2-wordpress-backend, in late 2022 that takes care of most of the technicalities of getting everything working, and Clifford does a great job in the YouTube video above in explaining how to set this up.

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