I'm in a similar position. The
server I maintain where our school Moodle site is hosted already uses Geeklog for different projects. I'm grappling now with the choice of whether to go with Geeklog for the school homepage and Moodle only for the course-related stuff, or just go pure Moodle for the whole site. I really hate to have to both maintain and saddle the users with learning two systems (or have to cobble together sufficient integration between the systems to make them appear as one) partly because I'm lazy, and partly because I want to keep the learning curve down for the users. As for other CMSes such as Xoops, I really don't want to have three systems to maintain, so unless I find Xoops (or some other CMS) offers sufficient advantages to be a compelling replacement for Geeklog for all of our projects, I'm pruning that option early.
So, what can Moodle do to help with the key problem? Is the answer simply to extend Moodle to make it do what we want? At this point I'm leaning towards a pure Moodle site, and only have a vague notion of what obstacles that might present us with in future. I would like some input on the real and perceived limitations of using Moodle as a general purpose CMS for all of a school's needs instead of pairing it with a more general CMS.
I guess one issue is making a really slick looking home page that has elements that don't directly relate to courses in it. But not having tried to build such a home page yet, and not having a clear idea of what those elements might be, I don't know if this is just a matter of first impressions based on what an "out of the box" Moodle install looks like, or whether there are real limitations posed by the software that would prevent us with achieving satisfactory results. Comments anyone?
Another issue is the board has expressed an interest in moderated forums: not for learning, but for other school
activities. This seems to be contrary to the philosophy of Moodle in general, and therefore something Moodle is not interested in supporting. I'd hate to have to mix in a whole different forum system just to handle that need, if Moodle could be adapted to support moderation. Is this a closed issue, or would the Moodle project be receptive to adding moderation as a feature to serve this need?
Ben