Progress, I think
I think I've made a step forward today. In looking around the web, I stumbled on an application known as Moodle. It's basically website in a package, but it is designed specifically for Learning Management Systems.
What this means is that it has a lot of the features they want at work, such as a user login system, quiz tracking, ability to stop and start courses at will, and many other features specifically for setting up a web based learning course. It's actually something I've seen used at the university and something was actually tossed out at the last project meeting.
I'm thinking that, like Wordpress, I can just create my own CSS theme and shift stuff around if need be to make it look more like they want and the it should be fairly easy to port. Moodle would just be the backend, basically.
I already looked into custom themes, and that seems doable. I'm working on some test content now along with quizzes and such. After I've got that in, I'll have to see about taking that content from it's current host and placing it on another. I know some data will be in the MySQL database and I think the rest will be in html files.
The other thing I have to find out is if we can get the client to have Apache, MySQL and PHP on their server..or run the XAMP package on it, though I'd think the latter is a bad idea. I think the Windows Server equivalent is IIS instead of Apache. I'll look up some documentation on implementing Moodle on a Windows server. Someone has probably tried it already.
Either way, it's something. Still need to get a Windows Server set up as a test bed, then I can find out how difficult this will be or at least what the client will need to agree to have on their server.
I swear it almost seems that with the price of some slim rack-mount servers that we should have just added that into the grant, set the system up and had it running then just handed the hardware over to them. I still think we are going to run into implementation issues when it gets down to the end of this. The client isn't going to let me have access to the host server, I have no experience just putting something like this together and handing it over, and moreover, I feel like their IT people wouldn't know what do with it when it comes. The people they had on the last phone conference, did not inspire me with confidence.