I recently posted a poster at the 4th European Workshop on Mathematical and Scientiffic e-Contents in Trondheim, Norway. As the main goal was to get the most possible feedback before I start working on the project, I thought it would be nice to post it here too...

Building a mathematical LCMS on top of a light, open CMS

Authoring, editing and publishing [mathematical] learning content adapted to today's environment (that is, the web) is still an unsolved problem.

Current approaches involve building a CMS or LMS from scratch, specifically oriented to mathematical content. Our approach involves using a widespread light CMS.

WordPress is a “state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability”, built on PHP and MySQL, focused on user experience and web standards. It started in 2003. It the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. It is an open source project with hundreds of developers who have created more than one thousand plug-ins for different ends, including the use of LaTeX markup for publication.

Ideally, we would want to achieve the following:

• Leverage authors knowledge of current markup languages (i.e. LaTeX) without negating support for more semantic standards (like MathML and/or OpenMath).
• Facilitate edition and a collaborative workflow.
• Facilitate interaction with readers / students.
• Produce native standards-respectful web content: (X)HTML for text and, currently, MathML for formula
  presentation.
• Allow the use of learning object repositories for resources.
• Semantic markup and metadata. Both for mathematical formulae and for units of knowledge (from learning
  units to propositions).

The popularity of WordPress is, among other reasons, effect of it simple but powerful user interface —an important issue if a publishing tool is to become popular— and has caused it to be available as a “one click install” from many web hosting providers. Finally, the availability of WordPress MU, an extension able to manage hundreds of installs of WordPress, should allow any institution to offer any of its members the possibility to publish on the web high quality standards-respectful mathematical content on the web. In order to better accommodate learning content and include optimal mathematical content support. To do that we need to:

• Ensure XHTML+MathML support, include LaTeX rendering plugins and study the available options to
  include [WYSIWYG] MathML/OpenMath authoring.
• Build an outliner that allows us to consolidate "WordPress entries" into a table of contents for a learning document.
• Define a flexible workflow allowing roles for authors and editors for content creation, revision, publishing and future revisions.

Each of these points should become a different WordPress plug-in. Taking into account that we want to benefit from WordPress future developments, special attention should be given to maximum compliance with the current WP inner working, both with regard to the database scheme and the code structure. Whenever possible, code should also be “platform-agnostic”, thinking about the migration to other CMS of different kinds, such as Drupal or Mediawiki.