Hi i have an education blog which has grown over the years. But i now want to grow the blog to an online education community.

Now my questions are these:

1). How do I REALLY go about doing this? My concern here is about my loyal readers and followers, and my database?
I do not think my blog provider can support that kind of site? How do I move all the previous posts, my readers and my followers to a real website's database without losing anything?

2). What's the best Learning Management Software for this? If you know the LMS they use at myschool.com.ng, I'd be grateful.
Am also open to better suggestions. I know open source software can be good, but depends on dedication. For example, I have a Nigerian online forum running on SMF, just like Nairaland used to run on SMF; but unlike Nairaland which has grown over the years, my site is now a dump of spam messages.

3). How do I register a domain with a .com.ng extension?
I feel this might be better than just a .com extension; or what do you think?

4). FINALLY, any additional suggestions would be extremely appreciated.
I'd appreciate any other hints, advice or guides that I'd not mentioned in my questions above.

Thanks in advance!

I have worked with Moodle LMS, and its good but you have to set money for a good hosting with lots of memory e.g semi-dedicated hosting and it should have SSH Access for you to install APC on PHP and some other stuff to scale the PHP Application. check this i did for a client leapsacademy.com Moodle is Open Source however its pure PHP and its own API so make sure to go over the Documentations and also get familiar with SCORM and AICC these are standards used in Adobe Captivate, its a really cool thing. take care hope that helps.

Hello @pc guru, thanks for the reply. I just know elementary details about Moodle and other LMS in general. I also happen to know Blackboard LMS is considered superior to Moodle LMS. I've always been a complete Blogger up until now, so I really NEED to update myself on LMS and the like. But frankly speaking, I really don't fancy the look of the site you referred me to i.e leapsacademy.com; for starters it looked quite dull right away. I prefer something colourful and exciting like you have at myschool.com.ng. I'd really appreciate further help in that direction

Yeah But Blackboard is not Opensource and yeah its dull but you deliver what the client request, the Moodle is not bad, if the styling is what you don't like you have power over the design, however as a developer Moodle itself is a Resource Hogger so additional styling to me was unnecessary as to make it minimal, but it will under go changes still, thanks for the opinion. Also check Efront I didn't touch that since it has a template engine which I despise but it shud suffice for you.