This post is continuation of “How to create and manage your academic or community website” article. In this one we will focus on the most popular free open source applications that you can use in order to create an e-Learning, school, academic or e-campus website with online lectures and other cool and helpful tools. We will review the most interesting tools and modules/ extensions that those application offer. Hence, you will get a brighter idea on which LMS is the one suitable for the online project you’re planning to start.
For those who consider themselves as new to LMS, we would like to shed some light on the meaning under the abbreviation LMS. A Learning Management System (LMS) is a software through which you can deliver learning content and resources to students, manage trainings, monitor students participation and assess their performance. LMS is very often used by large enterprises for their employees within the organization in order to monitor the effectiveness of company education and trainings. You can use various tools for organizing the online learning environment of your website, such as: competency management, certifications, succession planning, skills-gap analysis, virtual live classes and resource allocation (venues, rooms, textbooks, instructors, etc.). Students on your LMS web site are enabled to use interactive features such as threaded discussions, discussion forums and video conferencing.
Find below the table showing some of the main tools/ features that an LMS should offer. If the box is empty, that means that the feature is either not offered at the moment or it is in “coming soon” status. For further
detailed information on the functionality/ addons provided by these applications, please refer to the links
given below – we are sure you will find them helpful when making your mind which LMS application is the right for you.
This table compares the features of one of the most popular LMS applications (Moodle, Doceos, Atutor, Claroline, Docebo and JoomlaLMS). Still, you can review some other e-learning solutions on our LMS Hosting page.
In case you are not sure which one to choose, start with the one that offers the greatest number of features you need for your project. Then in time, if you feel this is not the right LMS application for you, you can change it with another one. At TMDHosting all that applications are provided with a pack of free services such as: Free installation and configuration, Free module installation, Free theme change. For more information on our LMS hosting services, feel free to contact us at anytime.
Magento is a new open source ecommerce platform that handle all aspects of building and maintaining an ecommerce site including shopping carts, shipping, product reviews, and much more. Magento offers advanced catalog and shopping cart price rule systems right out of the box, allowing Store Owners to create and customize anything from store-wide markdowns to highly specific coupons tailored to specialized customer groups. 
CRE Loaded is a fully functional shopping cart for Ecommerce sites. CRELoaded is built on the framework of OSCommerce .CRE has been refined and simplified a little though, so it is easier to customize, and easier to maintain long term. It is a flexible enough cart to handle stock/inventory tracking, multiple images per item, downloadable items, combinations of product types, it tracks customers and orders, and interfaces with a wide range of payment systems. This is a software driven shopping cart. That means it installs into the hosting space – your website is made of software instead of regular pages. 
VirtueMart is an Open Source E-Commerce solution (a Component or Plug-in) for the 
Coppermine is a multi-purpose fully-featured and integrated web picture gallery script written in PHP using GD or ImageMagick as image library. Coppermine supports template & user management, private galleries, automatic thumbnail creation, film strip, e-card feature and a template system for easy customization to match the rest of a site. The admin can manage albums/pictures/comments and batch add pictures that have been uploaded by FTP.
With Gallery2 you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums and photos can have view, edit, delete and other permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Albums can also have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Let your friends and family upload and manage their own photos on your website.
4images is a powerful web-based image gallery management system or a PHP and Database MySQL based Web Gallery for management, administration and presentation. Features include comment system, user registration and management, password protected administration area with browser-based upload and HTML templates for page layout and design.By using the integrated template system the design and layout can be customized easily. 4images is multilingual: an external language file can be used for translation in other languages.
phpAlbum.net is an Open Source PHP script which allows you to create your personal Photo Album / Gallery in just a seconds. All you need is a web space with FTP access. No database is needed. After a few clicks with our phpAlubm.net Installer you are ready to upload your photos, create new directories /galleries, and use your photo album. phpAlbum allows HTML content. There is also a searchfield option available.
Plogger is the next generation in open-source photo gallery systems. A web application not bloated with superfluous features or complicated configuration settings. Plogger is a simple yet powerful tool – everything you need to share your images with the world. Plogger is your photos integrated into your website, a fully featured photo sharing package with an attractive and easy to use administrative interface that makes managing your galleries a breeze. Integrating Plogger gallery software into your website is as easy as inserting three lines of PHP code.
