User:Shaddyz/Trellis LMS

Trellis is a free, web-based learning management system written in PHP and managed by Learning.net. It was created with the intention of being easy to extend and customize for use in various learning environments by maintaining a flexible and efficient framework. Although its creators focus on its framework, it comes as a full-featured system.

History
Trellis began as an internal project at Learning.net in October of 2006. The decision was made due to issues with their legacy software not being able to handle the variety of features their clients were requesting. As Trellis matured, the company decided to make it freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Design
Trellis is broken up into a collection of core objects and functions which each handle a specific task. The core consists of database, session, plugin, and error handling. This core is then combined with an interface and its related objects and functions. The current interfaces include a user interface, an asset retrieval system, an event system, a command-line utility, and an application programming interface. These interfaces generally include common data retrieval objects which use the database object to interact with the database which provide a simple and standardized method of accessing the database.

Each installation of Trellis can support multiple "clients" which translate into individual learning centers. Each learning center is completely independent from other learning centers sharing only the software and the hardware on which the software is installed. An organization will typically only use a single learning center unless it wishes to operate completely independent learning centers on the same hardware.

The standard user interface includes three subdivisions: Learning Center/Base, Admin, and System. The learning center or base site is where general users, or learners, access Trellis for learning. The admin, or administration interface, is where learning administrators access tasks to administer their learners and learning content. The system interface is where system administrators can administer the clients and the software itself.

Development
Trellis is actively developed by Learning.net and documented on the project's website, mailing lists, and wiki. An issue tracker is also publicly available and the developers encourage everyone to participate. Public access to the software's Subversion repositories are limited to read-only, however, the developers request that patches be emailed to them.

Links

 * Official Trellis Website
 * Learning.net