Things change rapidly in the WordPress world. The content in this post is more than a year old and may no longer represent best practices.
At the November 2014 East Bay WordPress Meetup, we discussed Learning Management System (LMS) plugins for WordPress.
There are a number of standalone open-source LMS products, such as Moodle and Sakai, which usually have more comprehensive features than the WordPress plugins do. The WordPress plugins are aimed more at use on sites which need to offer things besides just training.
The LMS plugins that Sallie had a chance to test were Sensei from WooThemes, Learndash by Justin Ferrinman, and CoursePress (free) from WPMUDEV. She did look briefly at the free demo of WP Courseware from Fly Plugins and has just (late December) received an evaluation license for LifterLMS.
LearnDash LMS
Price: $129 basic (one-time, unlimited sites), $159 with Pro Panel (one-time, unlimited sites)
- e-Commerce integrations: EDD, WooCommerce, Jigoshop, iThemes Exchange
- Drip feeding of lessons
- New bbPress integration for course forums
- EventEspresso integration for events
- Many integrations for university courseware
- Extensive documentation (for registered users)
- Some UI issues, but overall the most comprehensive of the plugins tested before November
WooThemes Sensei
Price: $129 Single Site, $179 5 Sites, $279 25 Sites
- Integrates with WooCommerce (duh) for selling courses
- New Content Drip extension ($29)
- Free extension to group lessons into Modules
- Free Media Attachments extension
- BadgeOS extension ($19)
- More options in terms of custom post type and custom taxonomy display than other solutions
- Noticed some CSS quirks when used with Genesis themes
- Works with Groups or WooCommerce Subscriptions for membership
- Extensive documentation
CoursePress (Free Version)
http://youtu.be/HXzOBRYVjDw
Price: Free (2-course limit); $19/month for CoursePress Pro
- Integrates with WPMUDEV’s MarketPress to sell courses
- Integrates with WPMUDEV’s “Chat” plugin for discussions
- Integrations generally limited to other WPMUDEV products
- Allegedly compatible with BuddyPress
- No course taxonomies
- Visual UI is nice, but there’s no text/html editor for courses
- Courses not recognized as a custom post type by the Genesis CPT widgets
- Impressive for a free product, with fairly good documentation, but not suitable for the LMS project Sallie was working on.
WP Courseware
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n37bpt_SckA
Price: 2 sites $99, 10 sites $125, 25 sites $175
- Integrates with many membership plugins, including iThemes Exchange, as well as WP Achievements for gamification
- Quizzes and surveys
- Grade books
- Certificates
- No mention of forum integration
- Despite Chris Lema’s high praise, I couldn’t see from the demo that it did anything LearnDash doesn’t
LifterLMS
Price: $97 single-site, $297 5-site
- E-commerce and membership functions built in
- Quizzes (manual or automatic grading)
- Drip-feeding
- Plans for integration with Google Hangouts, live event management, and SoundCloud
- Still extremely new, but I’m looking forward to testing it
Thanks for including us, Lifter LMS, in the write up. We’re in good company. There’s a lot of great LMS plugins out there that I have a lot of respect for. Online education presents such a huge opportunity for so many different avenues for development. It’s cool to see how all these plugins decide to tackle the challenges in elearning and what opportunities they focus on in the LMS space.