On Wednesday, November 12, 2014 8:11:16 AM UTC-8, Ari Davidow wrote: > > I am curious as to why you would write an LMS from scratch, rather than > use an existing framework--edX uses Django and that code is open-sourced > and available. Other open source possibilities, not relying on Django, > include Moodle and Sakai. >
The nine months I spent working on a Sakai project were among the very worst of my professional development career. And it's virtually a dead project now. Now I'm working part-time on a large Moodle installation and finding it incredibly frustrating. You know how they say PHP has a tendency toward sprawling spaghetti code? Moodle feels like the poster child for that tendency. It's badly written, badly documented, the community is full of people taking wild guesses, plugins are half-baked, and lots of people are hacking core to make it do what they need it to do. A lot of the complexity and mess in these products comes from their need to be all things to all people. Everything is overly abstracted, and 90% of the features you'll never use. Meanwhile you bear the brunt of all that baggage and complexity. I am currently lobbying the .edu I work for to replace a Moodle installation with a custom Django system that will do exactly the things we need it to do and nothing more. To discard the complexity and baggage and replace it with clean data modeling and known workflows that aren't "black box." Case in point: I spent around a month getting the Moodle course enrollment system to behave with a PHP script. Then I wrote a similar one for a separate Django system on the side. The Django version worked the first time and was literally 1/0 the size, in lines of code. ./s > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-users/6584d076-0aea-47a3-86d7-4ef0a3cb5f57%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
