Have you tried Xoops? I heard it can run moodle inside.

http://xoops.org/

You could try moodle for xoops:

moodle4xoops

I haven't tried it myself but I would be interested to hear from people who have. Of the various CMS's, mambo is pretty straightforward, especially if you install it from fantastico.

Heavy, but worth the effort: http://typo3.com/Feature_list.1243.0.html

http://typo3.com/What_is_a_CMS.1351.0.html

 http://typo3.org

(Can - in principle - share LDAP with Moodle)

Hi all,

I have just started looking at CMS also and I found one I really liked for schools. It's original design is for elementary but I can see how easy it is to play with the templates and layout. It's a sourceforge project.

Here are the links
Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/siteatschool/

Project Homepage: http://siteatschool.sourceforge.net/

Online Manual in various languages: http://wyxs.net/manuals/index.php

If you have any comments please let me know.

Thanks,
Deon

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

Thanks Hideto, James, Deon and Ger. It seems I've opened a can of worms here!

It would be nice for Moodle to support a whole school model with Faculty/Staff/Student pages, Galleries and Parent/Visitor sections. My coding skills are very poor at the moment but I'd be prepared to help with documentation or virtual tea and biscuits!

Hi Laurie,

Thanks for a very useful question!  You wrote...
I want to enable users to have home pages within its structure and to be able to organise the home pages in categories (teachers, admin, students by year)

I think Moodle version 1.5 will handle much of what you describe.  Discussions on MyMoodle/Profile and blog module indicate that developers are dealing with the same needs.  My suggestion would be for you to...

• join and search through discussions on Blog, Profile/Portfolio, DMS
• download version 1.5dev and test out what is developing, then give  requests for refinement to the programmers.  Now is not too late to make specific feature/layout requests.
• donate to moodle.org so these fine programmers can focus on our requests. (and get a button from Irene )

Sorry, I'm coming into this discussion late (I've been gone for our winter holiday break).

Another nice open source content management systems is Plone. We looked at several different ones when we decided to revamp our program's page, and Plone was the one that best suited our needs. Of course, your mileage may vary.

With a small amount of tweaking, we were able to make our Plone portal match our Moodle site pretty well. We're using a modified version of the OS X Blue theme for our Moodle system, and it wasn't too hard to port that look and feel to Plone.