Product Reviews

Moodle is great. There, you Moodle fans out there, I’ll give you that- It’s a great platform, full of options and customizability, even some ecommerce potential. I’m developing pay-to-learn sites and am working on a workable platform. But I’m giving up on using Moodle, and here’s why: no control over the user’s progression thru a course. Moodle was designed from the outset to allow students to peruse a course in a non-linear fashion- it’s almost a religious belief with the Moodle-ers on the forums.

One poor Moodle forum newbie posted a message with his desire that he be able to control a user’s linear path through a Moodle course. He was designing courses for a state-sponsored certification exam, and the state agencies want to see an online course where access to Topic B is not possible without first successfully completing Topic A. Not exactly on the cutting edge of current education wisdom, but that is just the way it is.

Our hapless forum newbie was given a set of responses from the Moodle gurus laced with the scorn normally reserved for a Windows user posting a Perl problem on PerlMonks.com. One guru compared a linear learning path to a ‘mindless learning rat maze’. Ugh. So goes the entreprenuer’s voyages into the world of open source. If you want to use open source products for profit, be ready to swim on your own.

There are hacks available to implement ‘content locking’ in Moodle - but the hacks are not supported modules, and tend to break with each Moodle update. I never could get the hack to work with SCORM modules at all.

The other reason we are not going to use Moodle for our learning sites is the spotty support of SCORM offered by Moodle. With Moodle, your only real option if you want to use SCORM with any control over access to content is to post your course as one, big-ass SCO file. Not a workable solution.

In the coming weeks I’ll be reporting on our experiences with Claroline, another open-source learning package. It has a neat feature called ‘Learning Paths’ that can implement locks - as well as very easy and trouble-free SCORM support.

For years, we’ve been using email auto responder services like Aweber to communicate to readers and potential customers. One of the more popular techniques used is the blog announcement - an automated email that goes out every time you create a post. This technique keeps your readers engaged and encourages them to come back to your blog often.

Aweber has a feature that monitors the feed from your blog and when it sees a post - it triggers a pre-formatted email to your list. It’s not hard to configure and is very reliable. But if you are using your auto responder service primarily to send out blog announcements, you are paying for a service that you can get for free - using FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a free blogger service that takes your rss feed and packages it into many innovative delivery options. If you are new to FeedBurner, it takes a bit to get the hang of what they are really offering. The best way to learn is to simply create an account and start playing with it. It’s free - and the service has been recently acquired by Google.

Burn a feed and sign up for the email service - you’ll get simple code to put on your site that allows readers to opt-in to an email version of your blog - complete with attractive layouts, links, etc. It’s totally double opt-in, and works flawlessly.

Here is what the opt-in form looks like:

Or, include a simple opt-in link: Subscribe to Data SystemsPlus by Email. Feel free to opt in to my blog list!

FeedBurner email is the way to go for blog announcement lists - it’s free, professional - looking and readers know they are not giving their email to be spammed with the one-click unsubscribe.

Membership or subscription web sites offer great advantages to internet marketers weary of selling digital goods that have been commoditized, such as resale rights products and software. You get to control the content, distribution and pricing of your products - and if you implement a generous affiliate program, you’ll free yourself from the tyranny of the Internet giants for traffic and customers.

WordPress works well for most people because it’s easy to set up and offers loads of custom themes and plugins, all for free. I’ve researched WordPress as a membership site and found there are many that are looking for a solution. I’ve discovered one - it’s not what I’d call ‘industrial strength’, but it is adequate for most smaller membership sites.

iDevSpot.com offers a product called iSubscribe. It is a php-based page protection script with a very good PayPal ipn feature. Most commercial scripts I’ve tried have spotty ipn results; not this one. In fact, most of iDevSpot’s products have PayPal payments built in - and they really work.

Now you are not going to be able to run a community behind this script, such as forums, etc. and have the user’s accounts tied to their site access password. This script uses a php include to protect pages - your pages have to be in php (no folder-level protection using .htaccess). But if you just want to provide some premium content in WordPress and have a convenient way for user to pay for it - iSubscribe is the way to go. It is also easy to integrate iSubscribe with NixieAffiliate, iDevSpot’s affiliate script.

This script does have one issue with sending email - it uses the php built-in mail() function and it may behave strangely on some web hosts. It currently does on my install and I’m working on a fix - which I’ll post here. Most commercial php scripts arrive to you encrypted - but IdevSpot’s scripts are not, and are easy to modify as you see fit. The site’s forums are helpful and friendly. Note that this script is not just for WordPress - it will protect any php web page.

Given the very reasonable cost of this script - I recommend you give iDevSpot’s iSubscribe a try.