Trainers Talk Tech

I have been fascinated by the Joomla and Drupal development environments for a long time. I just never took the plunge and learned either. In my business, I do all the design work, the graphic work and the multimedia work and if the back end programming gets to sticky, I turn it over to my developers.

Joomla and Drupal have created web applications that become your content management system and back end plug in system. Anything that makes the back end programming less painful is great for me. If it is great for me, then I'm sure that it would be great for eLearning developers who are intimidated by this web stuff.

So, last night I took the plunge and launched www.myelearningguru.com as a Joomla installation. I picked up a good book on Joomla (Beginning Joomla) and installed on my new web host. I did nothing to it yet, so if you visit it, you can see the standard installation files. Keep visiting, because I hope to blog about the changes there, as well as talk about my experiences with Joomla.

What do programs like Joomla and Drupal do for the eLearning developer? Well, hosted content management, over 100 plug-ins and integration with standard web technologies make me envision the rapid development of internal training portals. For companies that don't want to invest in a LMS or SharePoint platform, maybe these tools can be used in that situation. However, as I work with the tool, I will undoubtedly come up with lots of ideas. From a strictly LMS perspective, I will be talking about Moodle soon, but because I don't want the My Elearning Guru site to be purely LMS, I thought I'd try Joomla. Maybe I could have a Drupal site, and then have a Moodle installation to run the demos on the same site? If I try that, I'll be sure to let you know.

Well, wish me luck. Visit www.myelearningguru.com often and you can witness the development of a Joomla site and a Joomla learning experience all rolled up into one hot mess!