Helios Course Hub Skeleton/Plugin – 1.0 Coming Soon, Early Feedback Welcome

Hey everyone,

I’m getting close to releasing the Grav Helios Course Hub 1.0 – the successor to my original Open Course Hub project, and a free, open-source plugin that transforms the Helios theme into a companion site for one or more courses.

If you already have a Helios license, I’d love for you to try it out and share feedback before the official release. Or, throw caution to the wind and buy a Helios license (and support the Grav CMS while doing that) and download both the Helios Site Skeleton and new Helios Course Hub skeleton 🚀

What it does:

• Turns Helios into a multi-course hub with automatic course switching

• Context-aware search – scoped to the current course, or site-wide from the Courses homepage

• Includes a Helios-inspired refresh of the Admin panel

• Ready in minutes – complete skeleton package with demo content included

Try the demos:

• Multi-course: demo.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-helios-course-hub

• Single course: demo.hibbittsdesign.org/grav-helios-single-course-hub/cpt-363-1/home

Download and GitHub project files:

• github.com/hibbitts-design/grav-skeleton-helios-course-hub/releases/latest/download/grav-skeleton-helios-course-hub.zip
• github.com/hibbitts-design/grav-skeleton-helios-course-hub
• github.com/hibbitts-design/grav-plugin-helios-course-hub

Happy to answer questions here or in Discord.

Congrats on the upcoming release, Paul! 👏 Great snippet for splitting page content.

This looks very useful to me! I have a question that I couldn’t find the answer to in the readme: Do users need to log in to Grav to see courses? I can imagine a scenario where different courses are for different user groups, so that seems to me the only way to do this.

Off the top of my head I think Grav’s authorising functionality should support this, but I haven’t tried it yet. If you could elaborate on that, I would really appreciate it. :folded_hands:

Tiny question – this will not work if the delimiter has been changed in config, right? That’s probably a variable which can be substituted for the hardcoded string.

Hi @Netzhexe , by design it is assumed all course materials are open and accessible by all (so no Grav login required). Each course would have it’s own URL, though all courses are still accessible.

Fair enough, thank you! I am seriously considering using your freshly developed skeleton as it fits the thing I am currently working on pretty well. I was asking because for my use case I need to restrict access to some pages to user groups – not least because I don’t want to overwhelm people with information they don’t need.

I spent the last hour figuring out how to do that with regular Grav tools, I’m sure that will work in your skeleton as well? I will happily test that and report back if you like.

One more question: for me this would not actually a course companion site but rather the actual course site. I am considering writing a plugin that would keep track of users’ progress, but I don’t want to integrate it with any other service. Can I just leave that part out, or is that somehow baked in?

The skeleton should work with user access levels, but I am unfamiliar with that aspect of Grav myself.

Re: tracking user progress nothing like that is included with the skeleton/plugin.

Good luck!

Sorry, I see I did not phrase that very well. My question was whether any integration with other services was necessary or whether I can just leave that out.

I have experimented some more though and now I have another question 😉 – can pages be shared between courses? Or is it a strict hierarchy? I imagine each course is a parent page in Grav, and then there are child pages, in which case reusing content from one course in another would be difficult. But maybe you’ve set it up differently?

You could just leave that out if I understand correctly.

Currently you cannot share pages between courses other than duplicating the pages between course folders or perhaps use the Page Inject plugin (included in Helios Course Hub skeleton) to inject source content into a dummy placeholder page.

Please feel free to connect via Mastodon or on Grav Discord if you have further questions! Thank you.