Membership Site Software – Moodle

Moodle is an open source online learning tool that you can use to create membership sites.

If you get a hosting account at Bluehost, you can use Fantastico to automatically create a Moodle website.

As you know if you are a regular reader of this website, I prefer the wordpress plugin  wishlist, which can also be set up on that same bluehost account.

Here is why my Moodle Membership Site failed:

1. Too many options – and I did not ignore them – I had to play.  Too many things will kill a membership site.
2. Poor integrating with eCommerce. Wishlist auto-builds your membership accounts if you use 1ShoppingCart.  How many people want to wait 24 to 48 hours for access to a membership site when they sign up.  Please note that with enough effort I am sure you can figure out how to do it with Moodle, but I could never get it to work and I have a technical background.
3. Basic templates were terrible. To make it look nice you have to do a lot of customization and design.  On the other end, with wordpress you have 1,000′s of great, free blog templates that make great, free membership sites.
4. Confusing courses - Moodle is probably very good for a department or even a full school to manage learning materials.  However, when you are trying to set up a streamlines membership site you do not want software that requires people to enroll in different courses and such.  The whole thing simply made it more difficult to manage.

Where there some good things using Moodle as our Membership Site Software?

Absolutely.  Moodle as membership site software has some advantages, such as if you want to do assessments, quizes, have discussion boards on each course, a glossary and many other real classroom kind of features.  That said, I have found that the cleaner and simpler a membership site is, the more likely people will use it and stay in the program.