Your Courageous Life

The Courageous Year started on Monday, though I opened it up for logging in as early as Saturday. WOW. What unexpected pleasures, what surprising challenges. I know that there’s a lot of talk among all of us who are doing e-courses as to what we use to cobble everything together, so I thought I’d share a bit about my experience with one particular content management system, Expression Engine.

As Andy was coding the backend for The Courageous Year, we were frequently needing to post to the support forums at EE to get advice on how to have them tweaked. Sometimes, the responses were helpful. Other times…not as much. I had an experience of posting to one forum to try and get help where a moderator was a little brusque with me, and that didn’t feel great. Yet I stuck with EE because a.) all of that work had already been put into developing the site, and b.) there just really isn’t a lot of great software out there that supports what many of us are trying to do with e-courses–integrating together a way to post exercises/lessons, give participants a way to connect with one another (via forums, usually), and have a login process of some sort. I’m aware of Ning, and don’t have anything in particular against it, except that they charge $25 a month if you want to skin your own site and not have ads everywhere, and even then one would still need to find/pay a developer for some good coding work.

What has been most frustrating about EE is that the things that “mess up” with this system are just such standard, easy things. For instance, when I post a weblog entry, there’s an option to have a new forum topic appear that is linked to that entry. Fantastic. Problem? If I post-date that entry because I want it to go live next week instead of immediately, the entry will wait to post on the correct date, but the forum thread posts immediately. I can’t figure out how to change it. I posted to the support area about this issue. No response so far, other than one user saying that they weren’t sure it could be done. And why not? It just seems like such bad form within the software itself–why allow me the capability to post-date an entry and then make the forum topic go live immediately, instead of synching with the entry? If I’m post-dating an entry and associating a forum topic with that particular entry, wouldn’t it make intuitive sense that the user wants the forum topic to post when the entry posts? The end result is that I am unable to set something to post and leave it alone, trusting that it will simply execute itself. Instead, if I want a forum topic to coincide with the entry, I need to login each and every morning to get that topic started.

What was most frustrating about EE was that the glitch that showed up prevented a smooth username/password process for some participants. I tested out this process myself (before we went “live” with the site) by doing a fake registration, and things worked just fine, so I typed up the instructions and had them ready to go. It is a pretty standard procedure–registering a username and password, getting a confirmation email, clicking the link in the email and then being able to login. Yet some participants did not receive that confirmation email, so they were waiting for it to come through and never seeing it (not even in their SPAM folders) which meant that I needed to keep logging into the backend to “activate pending members.” How can something so simple be messed up? I had already done things like check to see if only certain people were being affected–i.e., if only Yahoo or Gmail users were being affected. Nope, that wasn’t the issue. Granted, everyone was able to get in because I would activate their usernames and passwords on my end, but if a system is supposed to be self-generating, I think it needs to actually work.

And again, the response from EE was not as quick as I would have liked for paid software. If I were using free open source software, where the support boards are staffed by volunteers who believe in the software, I’d expect to wait several days, maybe even a week to get help. But when I purchased a site license and commerical license, I believe that it’s out of line that I would need to go back into the support forums and nudge my topic to the top of the list so that it will be addressed rather than seemingly forgotten or overlooked. When I noticed that response time was slow before the Christmas holidays, I thought, “Well, it’s the holidays, this happens.” Unfortunately, I just went back into the system today, January 20th, and nudged an unanswered question to the top of the support forums list.

The last thing I’ll speak to in my review of whether or not EE is a good option for e-courses is the layout used in the backend to input entries. Entering a weblog entry on EE is ugly, offers few formatting options and even those are ridiculously basic, and the “preview” mode does not actually work to show me a realistic preview of what my entry will look like, with the CSS formatting. All “preview” mode does is show me a list of the text I entered, completely unformatted and without proper paragraph breaks or even the correct text size as determined by the CSS file that I created. Perhaps unfairly, I’m comparing my experience with EE to an experience such as using WordPress for uploading a new journal entry–WordPress is like poetry. Smooth, clean, easy, intuitive in its layout, with a simple control panel, the option to flip between a Visual/WYSWYG editor or a coding, HTML editor, and the preview function actually shows me what my formatted and complete entry will look like.

Again, this type of thing strikes me as a simple feature that EE could easily build into their site to make it cleaner looking and more functional (I call it “not functional” when, if I hit “preview,” I simply see a jumble of text. Of course if I hit “preview” I want to “preview” what the *actual* entry is going to look like, formatted and ready to go!).

Here is what I will say has been positive about Expression Engine: For one thing, it is really nice not to cobble together the e-course in a piecemeal fashion. Many e-courses are pulling forum capabilities from one place, developing entries from another place, and then use a .htaccess system (easily hackable) to password protect the course for users. Expression Engine is streamlined and an all-in-one package on the USER end. My concerns with it as described in this entry have mostly to do with my backend experience, not with what the people using the e-course are seeing. So if someone is pulling together an e-course or in need of a content management system and they are willing to put up with the limitations I describe above, they could do so knowing that their users would not necessarily be affected.

I also really like that the forums setup is pretty clean and the individual member walls can be customized so that the user can input a lot of information about themselves that personalizes their experience, search for all posts by a particular user, etc. The forum navigation is also cleaner and easier to “see” than my experience when using Ning. I have not had any issues integrating videos into the e-course through embedding code, and theoretically, if all works as it is supposed to, opening another level of The Courageous Year or even taking on a new round of participants will be very simple–instead of re-creating the entire thing, I’ll need only to create a new “module” and then assign new members to that new “module” so that members from one group don’t see what another group is doing, and vice-versa. From an e-course standpoint, this is a helpful thing!

Then again, I haven’t yet gotten to working out those modules yet, so I confess I feel a bit of a hesitance to assume that it’s all going to work as smoothly as I’m thinking it should…there might be some intense backend coding work to do to get a new module ready for new users.

And can I just give a shout out to the wonderful participants who were really patient if they ran into any snafus? Thank you thank you.

Three days in and things are executing as they should, people are interacting, and the fun is beginning.

Related posts:

• at the starting gate…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:44 am |