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Question by Jeffery Smith: Is Joomla powerful enough to make an online class?
I have gone through the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Joomla. I have not used Joomla 1.5, as Joomla 1.6 is what my hosting service had installed for me.

I have made websites for people for many years now (mostly basic HTML sites, but some that used PHP/My SQL, Flash, and Javascript), but have only recently considered dropping all of the cumbersome coding/debugging/security fixes in favor of a good Content Management System.

I’ve really spent the past day doing all I can to research Joomla and learn it. I am very impressed with it so far, but am still not sure if it is powerful enough to use with a current client. I’m not sure if I should invest the time learning how to use Joomla if I wouldn’t be able to use it for my new client in the first place.

My client owns a defensive driving school, and wants to make an online course out of it. I know Joomla can handle secure logins and payment systems, but there are some other things that I am not sure about. Here’s the hard part: The course needs to keep track of how long a user has spent viewing a page and administer a test to the student at the end of each chapter. The student has three attempts to pass each test; if failed, the user must restart the course at the beginning. Due to state regulations, a user must view each section of each chapter for a minimum of 30 seconds before being able to move on to the next section. Additionally, whenever a user moves on to the next section, the site will randomly sometimes navigate to an intermediary page that prompts the user for information such as his/her drivers license number as a way of verifying that the proper user is still taking the course. The system needs to be able to keep track of where the user is in the course. It would help to have a countdown displayed that shows how much longer a user must spend on a section before being allowed to move on to the next section. Also, the course MUST be viewed sequentially. A user cannot view just any section of any chapter. For example, to view section 2 of chapter 1, the user must first “finish” section 1 of chapter 1 (When I say “finish”, I mean view the section for at least 30 seconds). To view section 5 of chapter 3, the user must first finish ALL sections up to and including section 4 of chapter 3, as well as pass the tests for chapters 1 and 2.

I also need to embed Flash animations and audio clips, but it would seem like doing such things is made easy in Joomla.

I am trying to decide whether I should use Joomla for this defensive driving online course, or just stick with pure HTML/PHP/Javascript. I’d really like to be able to use Joomla, as it seems it would be much easier and more streamlined with Joomla.

Best answer:

Answer by nosmirc flen
Have you looked at http://moodle.org/ ?

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