I'm trying to set up a site where my students can go and do lots of work on their own time. For the past month, I've explored both MOOC and ELMS, and the closest I got to doing anything I really want was configuring the site, downloading modules, hunting down solutions to modules with coding errors, and wondering what the heck I am doing. Both Mooc and ELMS have series module glitches, and one of them pops up in Mooc when Mooc permissions are activated. That causes the whole site to be inaccessible.
I don't know PHP, and it seems I don't know Drupal anymore. Once upon a time, I could get a site up and running in Drupal in no time at all. Now, it's almost a month, and I can't figure out how to get all the text to show on the home page without page counts and teasers. I've been trying to set up a registration page that seeks more info than Signups wants, no go. I'm just going to take down both experimental sites and leave Drupal alone because it does not seem to be something non-programmers can use. That's a great pity cuz Drupal has exactly the modules I need for my class.
THis past week was an exercise in hunting down solutions to module PHP errors. Only once did I find a solution in which the poster very clearly and explicitly provided directions to help solve the problem. In browsing the forums and such, I know folks here are very helpful. I also know that people seem to forget that not everyone can code PHP, SQL, or whatever. Some of us are new (after a hiatus of about nine years not using Drupal). So, solutions without directions are like no solutions at all. All this great info but what to do with it?
I'm going to set up a test site with Moodle or something and see how quickly a site can be up and fully functional.
Comments
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working in a niche with distros is definitely challenging-- especially with ones with such low usage (that just means there's far far fewer resources available to assist when you run into troubles). Personally, I wouldn't use a distro unless its hugely supported (ie commerce_kickstart) or mostly standard with some features style preconfig.
What type of sites are the ones you've gotten up and running in no time? There's a huge difference between building a basic site and building an ELMS type application-- regardless of the tool you select. Expecting to build something like ELMS (as opposed to a blog or portfolio site) without ANY coding skills at all is somewhat unrealistic. Webdev has come a long way-- but not that far, lol. You'll also find people far less willing to handhold someone without the necessary skills through such complexities than they are to help out the same type of user with a blog.
That said however, if moodle meets your needs what's wrong with that?
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Hi, I don't really want the handholding cuz I like to figure things out myself, which is why I'm so frustrated, I guess. Documentation on using the distro would be helpful, beyond the usual how to install, a user guide would be nice, I mean. Previously, I used Drupal as a blog and zipped along just fine. It makes a difference, as you say.
Years ago, I tried Moodle and my students didn't like it.
Nothing is also something.
"Expecting to build something
"Expecting to build something like ELMS (as opposed to a blog or portfolio site) without ANY coding skills at all is somewhat unrealistic." -- Agreed, everyone I know that is running ELMS (my unit included) has at least 1 staff member dedicated to running Drupal / ELMS for a series of instructors, instructional designers, and thousands of students. It is not a "oh and I'll throw this up" style system at this time, despite making it my night and day best effort for the better part of 2 years now to ensure that the cost of entry is lowered.
Drupal is a very complicated system (a CMS for building CMSs if you will) and is increasingly so. I have dedicated about 5 years of my life now in attempting to achieve a level of proficiency with it to the point where I can contribute anything "meaningful". That said, it is definitely in need of additional usability testing. ELMS is a moot point, we had informal usability testing performed on it and as it's in Drupal 6 land and I don't actively develop for it, I wouldn't recommend starting there if you have issues with it, you won't overcome them.
I'd start with Drupal 7 and recommend potentially checking out other distributions or just starting from scratch with Drupal and throwing in a few modules to try and make life easier. Nittany has become a popular starting point for just building websites for many in the education space because it pulls together projects that help alleviate the abstract nature of Drupal and make it more tangible as a CMS. For example, it comes with a well established, and preconfigured, text editor (CKEditor) as just one example of "out of the box" functionality it provides.
In the future if you have issues with projects working please post in the issue queue (located to the right side of the project's page). This will help answer questions out in the open where others regularly expect to find them. groups.drupal.org is also another good place to check / post as there are many in the education space doing development work there.
Code for empowerment
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My post may have come across as a criticism of ELMS but it really wasn't meant that way. As a distro it's quite impressive (I have taken it for a test drive to check it out). However, even if it were 100% complete, bug free, and d7 I would still maintain that creating a site of that compexity would still require some coding skills. The odds that every one installing it wouldn't want to change a thing are pretty small imo. That's the only point that I was trying to make.
Plus, as I said, I've learned over the years not to become too reliant on anything with such a low user base-- the risk of abandonment and ending up with a dead end site are too large. As you point out, ELMS is D6 (and though work has started, there's not even a d7 dev snapshot published yet) and d6 is on the cusp of becoming unsupported. Plus D8 is likely to require a SIGNIFICANT rewrite which will further delay that version. Distros in general lag major releases by a significant amount-- though I do find them useful for investigating how they've solved issues in order to recreate those solutions manually. just my $.02-- ymmv.
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yeah... documentation is an ongoing issue no question. Developers develop-- that's what they do best. And since they're spending their time developing, it usually falls to non-developers to do the documentation which never seems to get done. There are far more people able to contribute documentation than there are developers, however, it doesn't seem important enough to them to contribute it though. Unfortunately, I don't see that changing any time soon.
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