Using Chamilo for MOOCs

Although the hype around MOOCs has faded a bit already, these Massively Open Online Courses are now part of the daily internet products or services you can invest in to make your professional or personal life better in the short, medium or even long term. But where some platforms like EdX clearly specialize in MOOCs, some people ask us whether Chamilo is ready for MOOCs.

Installation guide for Chamilo 1.11.4 on Digital Ocean with PHP7

This guide will take you through the process of installing the Chamilo e-learning portal, version 1.11.4 on a fresh Digital Ocean instance,on an Ubuntu 17.04 64bit distribution (also works with minor changes with Ubuntu 18.04) To follow this guide, you should be familiar with the notion of SSH keys and installing/configuring server software on Ubuntu 16.*, 17.* or 18.*. Previous articles on this blog explain how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms, how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10, and 1.10.* on Ubuntu 16.04.

Assignments in LMS: How to cope with disk space issues

In this article, we'll talk about managing an LMS when all institutional assignments handed in by students have to be handed in through the LMS, and what that means if you have several thousand students. This case is based on one of our customers which provides in-class English courses to about 55,000 students in a monthly cycle. The institution started working with us in 2012, so it's already been 5 years since we've started developing their custom Chamilo LMS setup.

Installation guide for Chamilo 1.10.x on Digital Ocean with PHP7

This guide will take you through the process of installing Chamilo 1.10 (from Github sources) for testing on a fresh Digital Ocean instance, on an Ubuntu 16.04 distribution. A previous article on this blog explains how to install Chamilo 1.9 using Juju Charms and another article explains how to install 1.10.2 on Ubuntu 15.10.

Change SVG icons to grayscale with Inkscape

If you design your icons in SVG with Inkscape and wonder how to quickly make an "inactive" icon in grayscale, here's a quick fix (at least for Linux users):

inkscape -f teacher_na.svg --verb EditSelectAll --verb org.inkscape.color.desaturate.noprefs --verb FileSave --verb FileQuit

This will edit your file in-place (so you need to take a copy first) and will require Inkscape to be launched, but all in all, this will make you save a lot of time.

Redirect mobile devices to alternate URL with Varnish 3.0 and Drupal 6

This is a short note for ourselves, but it might help others considering the (new for now) rules of Google indexing of non-mobile sites. Drupal 6 does not really provide all the stuff that would be really useful to switch the theme of your site depending on the browser being on a mobile device or not. There are a few modules that should help you, like switchtheme, and mobile_subdomain, but in the end, you can also do it as follows.

Setting up Apache (or web server x)

Let's assume your site is called your.site.com and you want mobile devices to see another theme. Define the m.site.co

Benchmark: dirname(__FILE__) vs __DIR__ in PHP

dirname(__FILE__) and __DIR__ give exactly the same result in PHP, although one (__DIR__) is evaluated at compile-time, while the other (dirname(__FILE__)) has at least part of it (the function) evaluated at execution time. Ever wondered what the difference is, in terms of efficiency, between the two? I've written a *very* simple script to try it out: 
<?php
$loops = 100000000;
echo 'Testing dirname(__FILE__)' . PHP_EOL;
$start = time();
$dir = '';
for ($i = 0; $i < $loops; $i++) {
 $dir = dirname(__FILE__);
}
echo 'dirname(__FILE__) took ' . (time()-$start) . 's' .
Subscribe to Best practices