Homepage¶

As the public entrypoint into the platform, the homepage often needs special customization.

Xikolo offers a few re-usable building blocks that can be used to easily build a custom homepage without much effort.

Custom markup¶

If the homepage should be customized significantly for a brand, custom HTML markup may become necessary. The homepage is rendered by the index action of the Home::HomeController. If necessary, a branded template can be registered in the CUSTOM_BRAND_TEMPLATES array within the controller. Per convention, the template must then be named app/views/home/home/index_<name>.html.slim.

Components¶

Course categories¶

Highlighting current or popular courses is a common use-case for the platform homepage. To render a “category” of courses, e.g. based on start date or other forms of categorization, a brand needs to do the following:

Register a custom “course loader” in an initializer: this must be a callable object that returns an array of renderable components when called.
In the template, loop over @categories and call render on them.

To make this easy, Xikolo provides the Home::Category component that can render any “category” object passed to it. Such a category must provide the methods title, url and courses. If the url method returns a truthy value, a button will show up and link to the given URL, e.g. the full course list. Xikolo also ships with three built-in categories that implement different ways of loading courses:

Catalog::Category::Channel - Publicly visible courses from the given channel.
Catalog::Category::Classifier - Publicly visible courses tagged with the given classifier.
Catalog::Category::CurrentAndUpcoming - Courses that are currently running or will start soon, ordered by start date.

Example:

# brand/<name>/initializers/homepage.rb
Rails.application.config.homepage_course_loader = proc do
  # Load current and upcoming courses
  current_and_upcoming = ::Catalog::Category::CurrentAndUpcoming.new

  # Only show the category if it is not empty
  current_and_upcoming.courses.any? ? [::Home::Category.new(current_and_upcoming)] : []
end