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I’ve been surveying Learning Management Systems (LMSs) over the last couple of days for a work project. The LMSs that I’ve been looking at must be Open Source and preferably written in PHP.

It looks like they are pretty similar in most ways – though I am not an educator, so it’s difficult for me to gauge systems on the lesson planning front.

I’ve read some really long, verbose, blog banter back and forth between users of Moodle and Sakai. Most of that got really academic and a lot of that was pointless brand-bashing.   My criteria is pretty simple: ease of installation and deployment, stability, extendability and customization. This install won’t be for a TRULY academic implementation but more of a internal training tool for an organization.

So what Open Source LMS would work best for us?

The two most likely candidates for our project appear to be Moodle and Sakai. There is a definite edge for Moodle for a couple substantial reasons — the first being that Moodle is PHP where Sakai is Java/Tomcat.

I’ve worked with an enterprise level Content Management System (CMS) that was Java/Tomcat called Alfresco — and I have to say that it was a miserable experience. At least in the case of Alfresco, Java was a significant memory hog and the system was very difficult to properly configure and successfully deploy. I fear that we would run into many similar issues with Sakai. And, unfortunately, one sometimes doesn’t uncover those sorts of problems until after getting past the point of commitment to the product.

The general opinion of Moodle expressed by it’s user community appears to be very positive. Additionally, Moodle claims to have over 45,000 registered installations of their product — most at academic institutions. Also, in my experience, PHP-based CMS systems seem to be much more straight-forward to install, configure and deploy.

A significant point that I’ve been trying to evaluate systems on centers on the ability, extent and ease with which the UI can be customized. From what I can see in my test installation and what I’ve been able to read, Moodle is pretty skinnable. The UI is controlled with CSS, which is pretty easy to deal with.

But the question I would like to get an answer to is, How difficult is it to change the basic layout of the system’s UI? How difficult is it to change the layour from 3- column to 1- or 2- column?

If anybody has experience with either of these LMSs, drop a comment and let me know what you think, please.

Tags: academic institutions, banter, cms, cms systems, cms web, content management system, couple of days, definite edge, educator, extent, java tomcat, learning management systems, lesson planning, level content, lmss, memory hog, moodle, open source, sakai, sorts, test installation, ui

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.