Whether it is a university like Albertus Magnus, a company or any other organization, e-learning is a great way to spread knowledge & measure the results efficiently (in means of time & money).

There are various open source e-learning applications that can be installed easily, have a wide user community & offers a complete system. Here are 7 of them which you will like:

eFront

eFront is a complete e-learning software with a good looking Ajaxed interface.

It enables admins to create & manage lessons easily with various tools like:

• content editors (has a flexible visual content editor and support for pictures, sound, video, flash or java)
• file manager & digital library (for file sharing)
• test builders
• abiity to assign projects
• creating surveys & more.

The system is multilingual & modular. It requires PHP & MySQL to run.

Moodle

Moodle is one of the most popular open source e-learning system. It is built with PHP & uses MySQL or PostgreSQL to store data.

It has powerful course management features that covers creating lessons, assignments, quizes, documents & more.

There are various modules that help students & teachers to interact with each other like chat, forum, survey or workshop.

It is used in 1000s of websites, has a detailed documentation & a wide community.

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Pixie is an open source website maker, built with PHP & uses MySQL,  which is very simple, focused & easy to use.

From the application’s website:

Pixie is not out to compete with any other site management tool. Our main goal is to keep Pixie so simple that even your Grandma could use it.

Pixie‘s difference starts from the installer. It lets you choose the type of site you need. A blog? Website for your band? Or a corporate look?

The application is seriously respectful to web standards, offers SEO friendly URLs & can be extended with modules, plugins, etc.

The look & feel of the websites can be customized with CSS & there are various free themes to start with.

Pixie creates the sitemap.xml for you, has RSS, multilanguage support & much more.

And, the application is improved continiously & extra information (like sites using it) can be found at the product’s blog.

TypePublish is a fresh CMS application that aims to be the WordPress for "corporate websites", specially with the simplicity it provides.

It is a well-planned application for any user (novice & expert internet users and developers).

Management of the content is well-organized & descriptive in every step.

Website content can be created in multiple languages & TypePublish supports this in the front-end.

Logo, favicon, contact page settings & similar basic (although handy for corporate users) information can be updated easily.

Using the admin panel, any statistics script can be installed too.

To summarize, TypePublish will probably meet the needs of a big percentage of corporate websites very well & nothing more, which is good in most cases.

Concrete5 is a very powerful & open source content management application which has a different approach in how it works.

It enables users to manage websites while browsing it by simply switching to the edit mode (an overlayed screen). This makes anyone who can use a text editing application administer their websites.

The application uses PHP / MySQL & built with OOP.

With a very easy to use interface, new pages can added, updated or deleted.

A simple yet effective user permission/role feature helps creating admins, editors & other types of users.

There is a built-in versioning system which simply saves the old versions of a page & who created/updated it.

The application supports templates / plugins & there is a community getting more active everyday to get support.

To see the beauty of the application, check this demo.

P.S. Concrete5 is choosen the project of the month in October 2008 by Sourceforge.

Liferay, with 60 tools and a selection of today’s most innovative technologies, enables you to do everything like:

• Creating websites.
• Building intranets.
• Simply getting the right documents and applications to the right people.

Liferay inlcudes web publishing, content management, collaboration and social networking.

With the role-based authorization, admins & users can define which information can be viewed by which users.

A strong set of community features help creating communities, user groups & they can have their own mini-portals.

Some other included features are: wikis, forums, instant messenger, calendar, webmail, blogs & more.

And, any other applications like accounting, sales can be integrated with its open architecture.

The application is "giant" with the features it offers & hard to describe its capabilities completely. Users interested in creating an enterprise portal should definitely check it.

Constructr is a fresh open source CMS application built with PHP & MySQL.

With an Ajaxed backend, this CMS application uses TinyMCE for content editing & supports clean URLs via mod_rewrite.

The admin interface has:

• Backend user & right management
• Asset center for uploads
• Integrated search engine for asset
• Automatic sync after FTP-uploads
• Automatic thumb´s for image-uploads
• Integrated shadowbox-viewer for assets
• Customizable backend language (Available: DE, EN, US, CH, AU)
• Live preview  for hidden pages and content

For the frontend:

• Cache system
• File based templates
• Multilingual frontend support
• Use a frontent that fits your special needs (pure PHP and MySQL, Smarty, Flash …)
• Individual 404 error page
• Automatic RSS 2.0-Feed for every single content

Like mentioned, this free content management system is still fresh but frequently updated & looks promising.

Alfresco is an open source enterprise level CMS application.

It provides document management, collaboration (in beta), records management, knowledge management, web content management and imaging.

Alfresco is built with Java & can be installed in both Window & Linux environments via "all-in-one installers".

Some features of Alfresco:

• Web Content Management
  • Web content authors can access and contribute content
  • Simply preview in-context changes to any web page or web application
  • Reduce the risk of error with simple a virtualization of changes against a live site
  • Use your tool of choice, such as Dreamweaver, for web interface development
  • The ability to preview in-context changes to any web application, including PHP, Ruby, JSF, Tiles, Struts, Groovy and .NET
• Document Management
  • All content is available via a shared drive interface
  • All content is available from within MS Office
  • Work in an MS Office environment for authoring and viewing
  • Save, version, share, search and audit
  • & many more..

This application is great for any company who wants to manage all the information from one central including websites, documents & knowledge.

INDXR is a PHP script enables you to display your portfolio in a "directory listing-like presentation" with minimum effort.

The application has an admin panel which you can define the default settings, add new images, videos & manage folders

You can set a width-height to auto-crop newly added images, call content from any feed like Flickr -Twitter, integrate the portfolio to currently built site of yours & more.

To view a demo of the application, you can view the websites using INDXR from the "participants" menu.

P.S. The application is currently in beta state.

Zimplit is a ridiculously easy to use free CMS application which is ideal for simple websites.

There is no standard admin panel. A toolbox appears after logging in & you start editing the website.

You can add images, links, edit the HTML of a page and copy a page to use it as a template for a new page.

It requires PHP 4.3+ to run & no databases required.

The application needs CHMOD 777 on all files for editing them. Since they are HTML files (except zimplit.php), it does not sound very bad.

ImpressCMS is a powerful & free PHP – MySQL content management system which is, currently, based on famous XOOPS but developed in another direction.

It is a community developed application and has already 150+ addons including e-commerce, forum support & more.

Some features:

• Fully modularized
• User registration & personalization
• User permissions management
• Multilanguage
• Theme-based skinnable interface
• & more..