Marketing Links and Custom Front end

[Sam Ako]

Hi :)

I'm trying to use a custom website as the frontend to edx-platform, kinda like what edx.org is doing with it's drupal frontend.

I'm thinking that will require that I be able to fetch course information through some sort of API, perhaps enable and use the mobile api?

'ENABLE_MOBILE_REST_API': True,

Also, I've seen the following settings in lms/envs/common.py

'ENABLE_MKTG_SITE': True,

MKTG_URLS = {
    'ABOUT': '/about-us',
    'CONTACT': '/contact-us',
    'FAQ': '/student-faq',
    'COURSES': '/courses',
    'ROOT': 'edx.org',
    'TOS': '/tos',
    'HONOR': '/terms',
    'PRIVACY': '/edx-privacy-policy',
    'WHAT_IS_VERIFIED_CERT': '/verified-certificate',
}

MKTG_URL_LINK_MAP = {
    'ABOUT': 'about',
    'CONTACT': 'contact',
    'FAQ': 'help',
    'COURSES': 'courses',
    'ROOT': 'root',
    'TOS': 'tos',
    'HONOR': 'honor',  # If your site does not have an honor code, simply delete this line.
    'PRIVACY': 'privacy',
    'PRESS': 'press',
    'BLOG': 'blog',
    'DONATE': 'donate',
    # Verified Certificates
    'WHAT_IS_VERIFIED_CERT': 'verified-certificate',
}

I get the impression these have something to do with such a setup, but I'm not sure exactly how. Also from some of the documentation I came across, it appears to suggest that MKTG_URL_LINK_MAP be empty while I set alternate URLs for marketing links in MKTG_URLS. If that's true, what's the purpose of that?

Generally I'm looking to know the steps I need to take to be able to 

1. Use a custom website as a front end to edx platform
2. List courses and course info on the front end
3. Search for courses on the front end
4. Categorize courses on the front end. E.g group then into subjects like Physics, Psychology etc

Would appreciate any help, thanks :)