New Mage Mastery Website

History

Back in 2019, when I decided to build an online portal for Magento 2 online courses, I was looking for a way to launch the website fast. After some investigation and consideration, I decided to go with GatsbyJS for the frontend and Strapi for the backend. The new single page with the subscription form has been launched at the magemastery.net domain.

The first online course launch has blown backend database away and we were forced to migrate the Postgres database to a bigger server. Our hosting for backend was Heroku and Netlify was for frontend. Obviously, with the lack of caching in place and hundreds of concurrent user requests, there was room for improvement.

We migrated from Heroku to Digital Ocean so that we can control the server capacity as well as expenses in a more granular way.

Website Architecture

Mage Mastery has been implemented in a way that there were 3 areas: public frontend, student portal, and teacher portal. All of these areas were built into one project source code. It became challenging to update different areas when new features were implemented without affecting other parts of the website.

A small trick we decided to go with was to split frontend and private student areas into different domains. So that every time a new feature is released for a student portal, it wouldn't affect frontend public website. The problem with this approach was that we still couldn't release new features fast enough to keep up with our backlog.

We also needed to have an easy-to-use interface for our blog authors to create new posts on the website. This is where we ended up with the new WordPress-based backend server where authors can create new posts. With the help of GraphQL, we managed to get posts from the backend to the public frontend.

Here is the Mage Mastery website architecture diagram.

Website Architecture

Having 5 project repositories, 3 databases, 4 admin panels for content, and 2 admins for video hosting management, we came to the conclusion that it is time to revisit Mage Mastery architecture.

New Website

Choosing Magento 2 Open Source as the platform for the Mage Mastery website wasn't the obvious choice. It came down to the fact that there is no really a Learning Management System that can be installed on top of Magento 2. Creating something from scratch wasn't an option easier, as we were looking for a wide range of website features that can be enabled with a minimum or no effort. For example, website security and search were the top 2 features we wanted to have with the new Mage Mastery website. Another feature we were looking for is transactional emails and templates. But the biggest concern for the Mage Mastery Premium Magento Courses website was the speed of online courses and content creation and publishing.

What's New

The biggest change on the new Mage Mastery website is the Customer Account. Now, every student has an integrated account where all online courses, course materials, assessments, and homework can be accessed from a single space. On top of that, a student can get order history as well as access to invoices.

Easy Navigation

All your courses are now available from a single website and accessible as quickly as opening Customer Navigation on the Mage Mastery website.

My Courses Page

The My Courses page provides you access to all your online courses that you purchased on the Mage Mastery website. You can see if an online course is available or expired as well as order id that redirects you to an order view page.

Lecture Page

On the lecture page, you can access your lecture materials as well as navigate through an online course curriculum.

I am super excited to share with you the new Mage Mastery website experience. I hope you enjoy your educational journey, and I will see you in the upcoming courses and trainings.