I am thinking about looking into it to develop some online learning material.

Anyone have any experience with using it?
Is it easy to customize templates?
Extensible?

I am going to kick start this thread again.

Anybody got any opinions on why someone should use Moodle instead of a more generic CMS like Drupal?

Moodle is an LMS, not a CMS. It's designed to create and deliver course material for schools, as well as for teachers to grade students, etc...

LMSes work very differently from CMSes, although something like Drupal could probably be configured to work like an LMS with a lot of work.

One thing you'll probably not easily adapt to Drupal is the way you upload scorms into an LMS (as course packages). It's a pretty unique way of handling course materials...

If you're doing a school or training site, I suggest you try Moodle out. It's the de facto standard for LMSes.

PS - to your original post - yes, moodle is extensible, and yes, the look is customizable.

Yes moodle is extensible, i have been working in Moodle for 2 years now..Its a great LMS.

I would suggest to look in to one of their forms

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=3017

In my opinion, you shall go for moodle for the following reasons,
With a huge community

• A large community of people are using it
• Instant help in forums
• Loads of contributed plug-ins available
• Nice and easy way of adding a plug ins
• Easily customizable code, if you are an experience PHP developer

I appreciate the feedback.

My contention though, is that an LMS is really just a subset of general content management systems.

In my position I already have a decent working knowledge of Drupal (and have access to a Drupal expert) whereas Moodle is really unknown territory.

From what I have seen of Moodle's MySQL table structures and read online (e.g. http://hackingthevalley.com/2010/03/...dle-vs-drupal/ ) it seems a little like Moodle is bloat-ware.

But I'm intrigued enough to keep looking into it.

An LMS is not just a subset of a CMS. It adds other capabilities that CMSes don't have (e.g. Scorm management).