Show HN: Helium – a headless, open-source LMS (opens in new tab)

When you say “headless, open-source LMS”, I assume this is the backend parts. This does not appear to be the case (nor does the actual link target use the word “headless”).

https://developer.thoughtindustries.com/build/developer-guid... (that entire site seems to be much more appropriate than the GitHub repository, though I’m not sure where to start):

> Helium is a frontend web development framework for building highly contextual, dynamic and personalized learning experiences.

> Helium utilizes a modern technology stack that includes React, GraphQL, and Tailwind CSS to provide an exceptional developer experience. The out-of-the-box UI components make getting started easy and with GraphQL getting to the data you need is intuitive and fast.

And below:

> Helium is designed to run on the Thought Industries Enterprise Learning Cloud platform. Therefore, an Enterprise Learning Cloud account is necessary.

So… it’s only any direct use for working with a commercial platform backend (and one with no posted price list, but only “schedule a demo” links). Being MIT-licensed, you might be able to pull substantial bits and pieces out of it (I dunno, the list in https://github.com/thoughtindustries/helium/tree/staging/pac... sounds mostly fairly generic), but it’s not designed for that in any way, and there will be a perpetual maintenance burden to doing so.

So I think that (a) the title here is wrong, and (b) it’s unsuitable for a Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). I suspect a misunderstanding of the purpose of Show HN by OP, who I suspect is not connected with Thought Industries.

When you Show HN a project/idea that has something to do with the user-facing (front-end) component to it, please have a demo or screenshots or videos of some final output. That way, it is easier for people to have an idea of what to expect.

"Helium provides you with a complete library of UI Components, Hooks, and Utilities that make building custom learning experiences fast, easy, and fun."

Brilliant! But where can I see some demo?

Looks like this is inspired by Shopify's hydrogen but for the LMS space.

So, this repo is an open-source set of components, but those components are tied to a graphql API which is provided by the parent org's closed source backend. That likely limits its use/relevance only to customers of https://www.thoughtindustries.com/ which I guess is fine, but the README should communicate it better.

I got excited about this until I realised it's actually a frontend development framework for LMS. Not "headless" in the classical sense.

What are the advantages of using this over Contentful [0] or Directus [1]?

[0]: https://www.contentful.com

[1]: https://directus.io

Why would you call it a word that already exists? I'm always baffled by these decisions to reuse already common names, which makes for very weird google searches.

Is there a free trial available? Would be interested to play around with this since my company is considering building homegrown. Thanks.