Content Management Systems

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Content Management Systems

Creating a Digital Classroom with Course and Content Management Systems

CMS defined: A tool that allows educators to create effective online learning communities that support online education.

WHAT?	WHY?	HOW?
A content management system is software that keeps track of every piece of content on your Web site, much like your local public library keeps track of books and stores them. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of.	A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage. A course management system can be described as a museum ~ a place to 'hang' all your content.	Locate an course management system that will meet the needs of your organization. Most require installation, so there is some technical setup. However, if using a contracted hosting provider, setup might be done by them.

Contents

1 Course Management Options
2 Evaluate Content Management Systems
3 CMS Resource Links

Course Management Options

Intro to Moodle

Moodle

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have (including webhosts), or it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University. Moodle has many modules and plugins available for customization and added functionality. Check out the Moodle Demonstration Courses or read the latest Moodle Buzz.

Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over half a million registered users The best place to start is Using Moodle.

Drupal

Drupal is a free open source software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Drupal is not web based, but requires a download and has an easy-to-use web installer! Drupal comes with built-in functionality, and there are dozens of freely available add-on modules, to enable ~ Content Management Systems, Blogs, Collaborative authoring environments (wikis), Forums, Peer-to-peer networking, Newsletters, Podcasting, Picture galleries and File uploads and downloads.

Mambo

Mambo is a free, open source, full-featured, content management system that can be used for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. It is used all over the world to power government portals, corporate intranets and extranets, e-commerce sites, nonprofit outreach, schools, church, and community sites.
There are hundreds of extensions, plugins and add-on products available for use with Mambo. These include forums, image and multimedia galleries, theme templates, document management tools, and more. Mambo has a web-based installer and their site indicates there are no complex set-up procedures.Once Mambo is set up, it is said to be simple for non-technical users to create and update content through a web browser-based editor.

Joomla

A content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Joomla is not web based and requires an installation. In many cases, users contract with a web hosting service that installs Joomla for them and allows the user to customize to suit their needs.