http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/08/wordpress-now-powers-25-of-the-web/
(seen on http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/11/08/2334257/wordpress-now-powers-25-of-the-web)
What do the Moodlers think?
Congratulations to Automattic. I like what I have seen in Wordpress. however it is wise to be careful when comparing Moodle with Wordpress as they are very different systems.
Wordpress core is a relatively small small system. A fresh install of Wordpress is around 11 tables and a fresh install of Moodle is around 300. Word press concentrates on doing one thing well, Moodle core does lots of things. Wordpress seems to have done a good job of encouraging 3rd party plugin development. Moodle has improved in this area over the last few years, and now I find the world of wordpress 3rd party tools to have a slightly wild and exciting edge.
As Marcus has said, Wordpress is nothing like Moodle, not even the same market niche: wordpress a blog that morphed into a CMS (as well), Moodle, well, maybe an LMS.
- We could learn a bit from Wordpress as to how it handles it's development, it's UX/UI changes and it's roadmap.
- BUT, if I need another blog, I'll be going for Ghost: https://ghost.org/
and this: https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/resources/wordpress-vs-ghost
I've been interested at the transparency of Ghost: https://blog.ghost.org/year-2/
A wonderful roadmap: https://trello.com/b/EceUgtCL/ghost-roadmap
But, 25% of the web is incredible.
-Derek
I had never heard of Ghost, thanks for that Derek. I have been reading the discussions on Wordpress at 25% of the web at Slashdot. Some folks were disputing that figure, but however you slice and dice it, Wordpress is running a huge amount of the web. One of the dangers of this of course is that any security issues will also affect a huge percent of the web. That's no fault of the Wordpress people who I believe take security seriously.
Hi Marcus, hi Derek
I agree with both of you that WordPress and Moode can not be compared one-to-one since one is a CMS and the other a LMS. But we can compare them in their approach. As both of you've observed:
- in size
As already mentioned WordPress core is tiny, Moodle core is huge
- in complexity
WordPress core does very little - but you'll find a plug-in for virtually anything. Moodle core tries to do everything that an LMS needs to do
The net result, for me, is that I can and enjoy doing deep changes in WordPress whereas I try to avoid at any cost doing the same in Moodle. I took a long time to regularly use a web-based (GUI!) tool to create web content. From the era of hand-made HTML I stayed with WML http://thewml.org/ a long time. Recently, just for content, I've chosen WordPress and wouldn't think of going back! (Well, at least for the kind of content I am involved in.)
Let's forget the number 25% of Internet. The point is, WordPress must be the number one CMS by a huge margin. Can Moodle claim that for LMS?
@Derek
You wrote:
> We could learn a bit from Wordpress as to how it handles it's development, it's UX/UI changes and it's roadmap.
Can you elaborate on that? May be you've already written that in moodle.org. In that case just give some pointers.
I agree with both of you that WordPress and Moode can not be compared one-to-one since one is a CMS and the other a LMS. But we can compare them in their approach. As both of you've observed:
- in size
As already mentioned WordPress core is tiny, Moodle core is huge
- in complexity
WordPress core does very little - but you'll find a plug-in for virtually anything. Moodle core tries to do everything that an LMS needs to do
The net result, for me, is that I can and enjoy doing deep changes in WordPress whereas I try to avoid at any cost doing the same in Moodle. I took a long time to regularly use a web-based (GUI!) tool to create web content. From the era of hand-made HTML I stayed with WML http://thewml.org/ a long time. Recently, just for content, I've chosen WordPress and wouldn't think of going back! (Well, at least for the kind of content I am involved in.)
Let's forget the number 25% of Internet. The point is, WordPress must be the number one CMS by a huge margin. Can Moodle claim that for LMS?
@Derek
You wrote:
> We could learn a bit from Wordpress as to how it handles it's development, it's UX/UI changes and it's roadmap.
Can you elaborate on that? May be you've already written that in moodle.org. In that case just give some pointers.
The point is, WordPress must be the number one CMS by a huge margin. Can Moodle claim that for LMS?
I suspect the answer is yes as the site registration indicates around 79 million users and I suspect the number of sites in use is bigger by several orders of magnitude. But that is just guesswork and I'm happy if nobody focusses on proving it.
I think one of the lessons is pluggability, Moodle should make even more things open to having plugins work with it.
Good article here about LMS adoption in the US:
http://edutechnica.com/2014/09/23/lms-data-the-first-year-update/
Shows Moodle at around 16% in the US in 2013.
Peter
A recent version of LMS usage at http://edutechnica.com/2015/10/10/lms-data-3rd-annual-update/ shows Moodle use higher than Blackboard in Canada and UK in 2015.
It's an impressive achievement have to give them that, I think the figure reflects ease of use of the platform. Wordpress has certainly come a long way since I was looking into what to use for a couple of sites a decade ago.
At that time I narrowed it down to Wordpress, Joomla/Mambo or Drupal. Other than a simple blog Wordpress couldn't cut it, I wasn't too sure how things where going to turn out with the fork of Mambo to Joomla so settled on Drupal due to it being more of a development platform than an out of the box CMS per se so figured we could use it for whatever came up. Rather a steep learning curve but even now I would probably make the same decision (mainly due to familiarity I guess but I still think you can get more done without having to resort to paid modules).
That said, it's worth having a look at other platforms now and then so I really should have a closer look at it nowadays ... I just haven't had the time recently.
At that time I narrowed it down to Wordpress, Joomla/Mambo or Drupal. Other than a simple blog Wordpress couldn't cut it, I wasn't too sure how things where going to turn out with the fork of Mambo to Joomla so settled on Drupal due to it being more of a development platform than an out of the box CMS per se so figured we could use it for whatever came up. Rather a steep learning curve but even now I would probably make the same decision (mainly due to familiarity I guess but I still think you can get more done without having to resort to paid modules).
That said, it's worth having a look at other platforms now and then so I really should have a closer look at it nowadays ... I just haven't had the time recently.