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eLearning or LMS plugins?
I have a client who is looking to sell online video courses through their website. Would this be something I could do with Textpattern? Doing Google searches I do see plugins for Joomla, Drupal & Wordpress.
I am more familiar with Textpattern, so this would be my first choice.
Thanks, Randy
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Re: eLearning or LMS plugins?
Probably :-)
It depends on your level of ingenuity and what the client wants exactly. For example:
- Are they hosting the videos themselves (in Textpattern’s Files panel) for download and dishing out automatic links to the files, or sending them later after payment?
- Are they taking payment through PayPal? Datacash? Square? WorldPay? …
Depending on those answers, the solution may vary. You could use yab_shop to manage the assets, although it’s not integrated with the Files panel – you sell “articles” that contain the product details. It would be up to you/your custom fields to link the articles to Files, and manage their uploading separately.
If you were hosting the files externally, you could use smd_remote_file to link them to your Textpattern Files panel. I haven’t checked the plugin for a while though, so it might need updating for Txp 4.6.x. Contact me if this is the case.
For offering automatic downloads, you can offer access-limited downloads to Txp resources (e.g. articles that contain download instructions, or directly link to access-limited Files) via smd_access_keys. That allows you to create time-limited and/or download-count limited access to downloads via unique tokens that you can email out, either manually or automatically. Won’t stop people sharing the actual video files after download of course.
For taking payments, I have smd_ipn which is a PayPal gateway listener. You set up PayPal to take payments and trigger a Txp URL on successful payment completion. That wakes up the plugin, records the transaction in its own internal DB table, and then hands off to a tag container so you can do “stuff”. That could update other records in the database, create access tokens in smd_access_keys, send out emails, whatever you like. But it’s only available for the PayPal API (and a pretty ancient version at that, I don’t know if it works on the new revision). Again, if you’d like me to look at this plugin and bring it up-to-date, I could.
There’s nothing to stop the smd_ipn concept working for other provider gateways, I just never got round to implementing them.
I’m sure there are other approaches. The key is that, yes, it can be done. The question is whether to bolt together some plugins to help, use another CMS with their suite of plugins, or just host everything on something like Shopify (Digital downloads).
It’ll probably come down to cost, how the client wants to manage the videos, and how they want to take payment. Once you know that, we can explore further options.
Hope that helps.
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Re: eLearning or LMS plugins?
Thanks Bloke, some really good points to check on. I believe they will be doing Paypal. I have a list of question to pose this weekend.
I am roughing out a quick prototype through XAMPP
I was thinking of Shopify, thanks for the reminder.
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