Building a Course Management System

[Doug Holton]

Graham Fawcett wrote:
 > My employer (University of Windsor, Canada) has given me the go-ahead
 > to prototype a CMS (Course Management System, not Content
 > Management), written in Python, to be released under an open-source
 > license (choice of license is TBA).
 >
 > Course Management is a rather broad domain, covering content
 > management, communications tools (e.g., announcements, mail, chat,
 > discussion), assessment (quizzes, surveys, assignments, gradebook),
 > activity tracking, etc. Ideally a good CMS will be portal-based, to
 > aid in managing information- and work-flow.
...
 > -- Are there other Python-based CMS (Course management systems) that
 > I've overlooked? (Zope4Edu came to mind, but it's commerical, I think;
 > at least, there's no public CVS that I can find.)

There is Fle3 (Zope-based):
http://fle3.uiah.fi/ and http://www.zschool.org/main (Fle3 + Plone)
See also Eclass.Builder: http://www.eclass.net/

Are you sure you wouldn't want to just adapt one of the existing PHP 
tools like ATutor or Moodle?:
http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EdTechPost/OpenSourceCourseManagementSystems
http://holton.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/LearningManagementSystem

That would be easier, esp. if you only have 8 weeks.  But if you do 
start a python CMS, you have to first decide which web framework to use:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/WebProgramming
http://colorstudy.com/docs/shootout.html

Good luck with it,
-Doug