Razvan Antonescu

As you might know I’m a big fan of using WordPress as a CMS. There are different mods and plugins for different purposes but so far I haven’t seen a full CMS plugin for e-learning. Today i Have found out about ScholarPress Courseware a Buddy Press plugin that seems like that optimal solution for an Open Source E-Learning CMS.

Of course this, as many other e-learning open-source solutions might not be ideal for an university but here are a few cases where it might work perfectly:

• Tutoring: If you are a teacher or a student that offers private classes and you want a low cost solution
• Trainers: You started a small business on training others on various fields
• Schools with low IT budgets
• Online counselling

Below you will find a list of features and a presentation video. This project looks so good that I hope it won’t be abandoned and become incompatible with future WordPress releases

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware features:

• Class Dashboard
• Courses (Works for both learning models: European/United States)
• Bibliography
  • Web API’s integration with WorldCat/ISBNdb
  • BibTex Import
• Assignments
  • Responses
  • Forum integration
  • Gradebook
  • CSV Import
• Schedules
  • Calendar
  • Month, Week, Day view
  • Integrates with Assignment due dates
  • iCal export
• Customization using an external CSS

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware presentation video:

BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware from Stas on Vimeo.

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I have always recommended (where it was possible) WordPress as a CMS platform. One of the main reasons is its extensibility and that for almost any task there is a plugin or one can be easily developed. I’m checking daily the WordPress Plugins section of WordPress.org and you can see my favorite plugins on del.icio.us. From today, I’m going to post them here too.

WP Download Codes

From developer:

The plugin enables to generation and management of download codes for .zip files.

Applications:

• Use it for any limited downloads that you might have on your WP based website (EX: release a beta software to a limited number of users)

Booking Calendar

From developer:

Using this plugin, you can add booking service to your site. Your site visitors can make booking of one or several days. Its can be interesting for hotel reservation service, rental service or any other service, where is needed making reservation at specific dates.

This post is written from the new WordPress 2.7 beta 1 that was released a few hours ago. So far so good:

1. Upgrade was without issues
2. All my plugins work
3. The new backend is confusing for a few seconds but once you start using it feels great

On the bad side I’m so curious who was the genius that changed “Write Posts” to “Add New” and “Manage Posts” to “Edit”

So if you are eager to try it, go ahead and download your copy from here

When using WordPress as a CMS platform, sometimes you want to collect user feedback or bug reports. For this task, so far, I have used Kampyle which is the best product in its class and more important is totally free. But sometimes you want to keep it all in house. For that case, now there is a solution and is called WordPress Help Desk.

Seems to have a lot of features and quite a pretty good degree of customization. What I like about it and Kampyle doesn’t have is that you can create views for your user leveles and this is quite important for a team website.

Practical applications:

• collect bugs
• use it in education oriented websites (colleges, schools, training websites) to provide help for your users
• e-commerce sites

Blogs in general don’t need custom or advanced menu. What comes by default in WordPress or custom themes is enough for most of the users. But when you try to use WordPress as a CMS platform for a medium size website you realize that’s not enough.

The challenge appears when you have too many static pages and you want to group them and show them to the visitors on certain conditions. In my projects so far, I have used GD Pages Navigator. This is a widget based plugin that does it job pretty fine. 

Today I’ve stumbled across WordPress Menu Creator that resembles features of other CMS systems like Joomla or Mambo. The resemblance might help more some users and developers to transition to WordPress as a CMS platform. Haven’t used it yet, but I’ll sure give it a try on the next challenge.