Chamilo 1.9.4 released, clear the way!

Image removed.Today we release Chamilo 1.9.4, with a number of notable improvements in speed, usability and features, but you know... that's nothing compared to what we're preparing for version 1.10. We've got a pocket full of kryptonite ready to blow your eyes out this year, but let's focus on 1.9.4 for now. You can download it from here: http://www.chamilo.org/en/download. The free campus will be upgraded, probably this week-end, to have everybody enjoying the improvements. For this great release, I'd like to personally thank our AMAZING team. We've all been hard at work, and they deserve some praise. In particular, thanks to Julio, Yoselyn, Hubert, Jérémie, José, Laura, Noa and, of course, Michela for their efforts in all directions, helping Chamilo spread like crazy and helping build this brilliant piece of software that you're probably downloading already. Many more people deserve thanks. They've all (I hope I didn't forget anybody) figuring in the Chamilo 1.9.4 credits. My sincere apologies to the Chamilo translators for having failed once again to distinguish their contributions and thank them properly for that. You make Chamilo a better tool for your communities and this is invaluable! You can find the full changelog of Chamilo 1.9.4, as always, on http://stable.chamilo.org/documentation/changelog.html, but if you prefer a short version, have it here:
  • Teachers can now generate an export in PDF all the certificates of their students at once (and print them as one big file)
  • Improvement to the attendances tool, allowing you to mark "late" students and warning you about overlaps
  • Stylesheets can now be uploaded *and downloaded* directly from the admin page, so happy editing!
  • Exercises now generate score reports by questions categories (nice!)
  • You can now group questions by the same media resource (a large text, a video, etc)
  • LP image is now shown as a starter icon on the course homepage if you want to
  • You can now create student classes through CSV import
  • General reports now show IP address to identify where this student was connecting from (you know... his exam seemed so good, for once...!?)
  • Considerably improved learning path usability
  • Single Sign On class has improved security with blocking per IP (or IP range) the Single Sign On origin
  • Improved responsive design: better positionning of most blocks
  • HTML5 support improvements
  • WCAG improvements (alt/title tags and other stuff)
  • SEO improvements: H1 and H2 tags reorganized
  • BigBlueButton plugin improvements and fixes
  • Fixed issues with IE9 (with and without compatibility mode) in exercises
  • Fixed problem with accentuated chars in image zones question types
  • Fixed issues with files upload in HTTPS
  • Fixed XLS questions import
  • Fixed courses copy bugs
  • Translation to Tagalog
But 1.9.4 is just one step further from 1.9.0, with 1.10 looming in th background for the big leap. 1.9.6 should be ready in about two months from now (mid March?), with just around 50 issues to review and fix (which will give us plenty of time to look at other important Chamilo stuff), then 1.10 should come out somewhere around May (that's a very wide guess). I don't want to sell it too early, so you'll just have to believe that what is coming is much more than what 1.9 was in comparison to 1.8. With 1.10, we should get a large foot into the large corporate environment scale, with Chamilo being used progressively by hundreds of thousands of users on a few portals, with more features, better efficiency (still) and a more reliable behaviour. To match our ambitions, we've worked even harder so that Chamilo could now be automatically tested, documented, analyzed (and soon packaged) by our brand new Jenkins server at http://testing.chamilo.org. With this one, we'll be able to optimize our review cycle, spending more time on important stuff, and less time fighting against undetected regressions. Including the new Symfony framework bits that we've been adding recently, Chamilo LMS (just that branch) has now about 1 million lines of code, which makes it a huge development project, so it was time for us to get armed with the proper weapons. Two new developers (maybe more) will soon be joining the team as well. Our previous projects have won us a long series of good relationships and we are on our way to grow, both as an association and as a group of companies. Talking about that, the association subscribed almost 50 new personal members last year, so if you're interested, don't hesitate to check out the guide on how to become a member. Our crowdfunding portal is on its way too, so you'll be able to show your support for a specific feature. More about this soon... And finally, Chamilo certification exams will soon be updated to Chamilo 1.9.4. You can buy an exam attempt at https://shop.beeznest.com. The process is completely automated. Video courses will be available for sale soon too. Want to have your own Chamilo 1.9.4 portal? Why not try Chamihost for free for 15 days? Oh, by the way, today's Chamilo's 3rd birthday! The amazing Chamilo project is warming up for 2013. Are you?