In search of help

[philipjcowan]

I have put the following post on the vBulletin Community Pre-Sales Forum:

I am planning on setting up a site which will enable teachers to share resources in their particular field. At the moment I am looking mainly at Media, but may wish to expand this to other subject areas.

At the moment, I am looking at Moodle because it has one very important facility which is essential for such a site — members can upload and download documents of all types. This means that if a teacher wishes to contribute they can log in and upload the document they have, regardless of format.

However, there are two problems with Moodle.

Firstly, it is primarily aimed at the teacher to student relationship and might require some adjustment for the teacher to teacher relationship that I am hoping to establish.

Secondly, I find the interface awful and think this would be off-putting for anyone who wanted to become a member.

My question is, can vBulletin be used so members can share items of any format (ie World and PDF documents, weblinks, mp3, Quicktime etc, etc), store them in logical sectors which are headlines (ie Film Studies, TV, Radio, Journalism, Mass Media and Ownership etc), put restrictions on their downloading options (I don't think Moodle can do this) and do this is in a simple, user-friendly fashion?

If anyone knows of any other possible platforms which I could use, please let me know, otherwise it might be a long, long summer of me trying to get to grips with php in a really deep sense!!

Cheers

Philip

[David]

vBulletin has a user album feature that can be used to upload and display photographs that other members can download but that's about it. However, vB is used widely and for lots of different purposes and it is highly extensible. A website exists where such extensions are made available (free of charge - vBulletin.org) and there are extensions that will do what you want. A quick search came up with this but I'm sure there are others available too.

You'll also find extensions that help you to integrate vB with other applications - here's one that integrates MediaWiki with vB. There is little need these days to build things from scratch - almost always, someone somewhere has done it for you - you just need to look.

I just had a more detailed look at the Links and Downloads Manager for vB and it seems pretty good and is likely to do what you want. It might even be useful to me. See more information here.

[Tom]

It could be helpful that David is familiar with VB.