Ask HN: Best platform for creating an online course?
In terms of quality of participant experience, attracting an audience, ease of course creation, and (of course) fair royalty fees.
Also consider WordPress.
Themes, rather, packages like WPLMS (http://themes.vibethemes.com/wplms/) and learn dash (https://www.learndash.com) are very powerful and flexible. With all the advantages (and hassles) that wordpress brings. Definitely worth considering, IMO. They cost around 80-100$ for a site license, and have an almost overwhelming number of features.
They include buddypress, as well as a host of forum / messaging apps and tracking / reporting functionality. WPLMS also includes a license for the woocommeece store, so you can directly setup a cart on the site. Really encourage you to check these + edX open out.
We opted for WPLMS also because it's not too difficult or very expensive to hire / find competent WordPress developers if we ever need to. Moodle / edX / etc. are less attractive from that perspective.
That being said, while we are currently building around WPLMS, we may eventually end up rolling our own setup. We are heavily dependent on the tincan API, particularly to capture "informal learning", real-world experiences, etc. Stuff that most LMSs (including WPLMS, etc.) currently aren't designed for. However, our requirements are pretty non-standard, so your mileage will likely differ..