Still The Best Platform

HONEST REVIEW:
SUMMARY: Still the best there is.

PLUS
1. We use it. We use most of the plugins. We run a complete college platform on it.
2. There is no better feature set especially if you want the power and reach of wordpress. (We need self hosting)
3. The support is above and beyond. Seriously. The support is quite good *IF* you know what you’re doing in the first place.
4. If I have a problem, I get a response in 24 hours. Within a few days it gets solved.
5. If I report a bug. It gets fixed. Might take a few weeks but it gets fixed.

MINUS
1. There is no ‘dashboard’ like there is in other products so that an instructor knows what’s ready for him or her to review or grade. Not even by class or student. So it’s quite frustrating to hunt and peck around for what needs doing. Notifications don’t seem to work either, so it doesn’t tell you when there is something to work on.
2. It’s a bit difficult to learn and there are missing navigation aids.(should be able to see everything about a user’s course from a tab on his backend profile) The authors do not speak english natively and some of the text is confusing or unclear. If you want both buddypress (social media) and bbpress forums (for your classes) you get a back end profile, the buddypress profile, and the learnpress (courses) profile
3. They include the quiz with the product for those who don’t interact with students, but you must buy the Assignments plugin if you want any kind of written response to grade. This really needs to be part of the core product, and you will need to purchase it even if you want just one or two sentence answers. (We use assignments exclusively).
4. The code is ‘iffy’ underneath. It is very clearly open source by multiple authors over multiple generations. If you are a developer and get into the code it will exasperate you. So that means you can’t sort of ‘hack’ your way through an urgent problem until they fix it. You are just stuck waiting.
5. Certain features do not work as they should (Learnpress-Buddypress Integration despite updates still can’t display certain pages, and ‘Orders’ results in 400’s now.) And does not include necessary features like i) instructor, ii) withdrawls, iii) gradbook, iv) wishlist. And there are ‘settings’ spread between the two different user interfaces, and no way to work around it. So it’s confusing for the user (and you).
6. The code does not clean up after itself when changed (numerous problems with content drip). And there is no way to clean up the database. And instead of creating tables and storing data in string arrays, simple data is often spread across many rows.

This in no way changes the fact that it’s the best feature set available.