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Open source CMS for schools?
3 points by jdironman on Dec 8, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Hello everyone, I am wondering what options there are as far as open source CMS for schools that people who are less tech savvy could use pretty easily. We used to use something called Julio (A drupal distribution) which I had to update what I could since it was no longer being updated.

https://www.drupal.org/project/julio

I really liked the school focused options it had. Thats kind of what we are looking for.

I'm sorry if this isn't the right place to post this.



It really depends on the scale of what you're doing. K12 or higher ed, how many students, how many classes, how many students in each class, etc.

I used to work part time as a jr. sysadmin for my university, we hosted Moodle for a slew of engineering courses. From both sides of the equation --- both as a student using Moodle in classes and as someone who was semi-aware of what went into hosting Moodle (wasn't a primary responsibility of mine), I think it's a great platform.

The university at large now uses Canvas. I can't speak to what it's like to host it, but I can say that as a student I think it's vastly inferior to Moodle or Desire2Learn. It has the same problem that a lot of modern websites have: the UI is very beautiful and modern but it requires a million clicks to get anything done, and the organization is a mess. There's no central page to see my grades. Some teachers don't put assignments into the system until they're due, which means that the "upcoming assignment" pages are useless because there are often times where an assignment isn't listed there. It seems very extensible, eg: there's an embedded Piazza tab on a couple of the Canvas pages for my courses, and my math class has a tab that brings up a real-time video chat if students want to work together remotely. These are definitely 3rd party and so the sky is the limit if there's some particular workflow that you want to add onto the platform.


I think you might have thought that I meant LMS or learning management system. I'm really just looking for a good content management system for a small K12 school district. A district website you know. We've been using WordPress which isn't terrible but I'm just wondering what the options are. Thank you for the great comment though. Alot of good information in there.


WordPress is what I was going to suggest. There are so many great plugins and themes now, as well as drag and drop screen builders that don't require coding. For a free CMS, it's hard to beat.


Check out OctoberCMS

https://octobercms.com/

Very nice simple but powerful system.

Open source as well.




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