When I launched the Virtual Buzz Assistant Network, I knew I would use a Wordpress blog for the marketing front end.  Wordpress is too powerful a marketing tool, and I do not know of anything that gets faster results.

However, to manage my community I wanted a really good membership management system.  I wanted to keep the cost low because I did not know how the community would grow.  So I began playing with open-source solutions for membership sites/learning sites.

#1 Moodle - I liked Moodle but I was putting in too many hours to customize it.  Also, there were a lot of features but I was not sure what features would ultimately matter to the members.

#2 Ning - To simplify things, I set up a version #2 of the network on Ning.  While setup was super easy, it was hard to customize elements and it was not easy to lay out training materials.  It was far more of a community-only kind of portal.

#3 DontNetNuke - Initially I really liked DotNetNuke because it was very easy to set up, had powerful features and could be customized.  I bought a nice professional template and relaunched the membership site in DotNetNuke, only to find that the next version of the browsers was doing funny things with the layout and most people were not using many of the features anyway.

#4 Litmus - I experimented with Litmus, but decided against it because of the higher cost of ownership and the lack of community features, such as a message board.  (Although they are adding that feature)

#5 Wordpress - I found myself coming full circle to appreciate just how powerful wordpress is for hosting a community site.  I added a message board plugin and a membership management plugin and now have a site that I am much more happy with.  It is steam-lines and easy to update.  It has fewer features, but I found from those past experiences that those features do not get used anyway.

Now that I have a great template and understanding of how to use Wordpress for a members site, I am thrilled with the many possibilities.  If you are thinking about launching a membership training site, I hope this summary helps you avoid the many months of research and experimenting I needed to go through so that I could finally realize the obvious.