Installation guide for Chamilo 1.11.16 on Digital Ocean with PHP7.4

This guide will take you through the process of installing the Chamilo e-learning portal, version 1.11.16 on a fresh Digital Ocean instance, on an Ubuntu 20.04 64bit distribution To follow this guide, you should be familiar with the notion of SSH keys and installing/configuring server software on Ubuntu. 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, 1.10.* on Ubuntu 16.04 and 1.11.* on Ubuntu 17.04.

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.

Why is the Chamilo package so big?

In recent years, the Chamilo LMS software we develop has grown in size, to something that many people might consider unreasonable (to some extent, we do too). This article explains why the Chamilo package for Chamilo 1.11.8 weighs 1100MB (yeah, 1.1GB!) or, in its compressed form, about 285MB. We've heard comments of many people about this. These usually go like this:

Why so many settings in Chamilo's configuration.php?

If you install Chamilo 1.11.6, for example, and dive into the details of its configuration, you might get confused by the fact that we have a "settings_current" table in the database at the same time as we have a (large) number of settings to be enabled through the app/config/configuration.php file. This boils down to one rule that we have established in Chamilo: minor versions do not contain database changes.

Major versus Minor versions

So the first question is: what is a "minor" version.

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.

Chamilo 1.11 on Raspberry Pi 3 for off-the-grid situations

This article can be considered an update of our first article on installing Chamilo (on a Raspberry Pi B+). This time, we are testing it with Raspberry 3, as of the 1st of April 2017 (no joke intended). Last time, we were testing with Chamilo 1.9, which is arguably less load-intensive, considering it doesn't include any Symfony component, and it doesn't require any .htaccess configuration.

Ergonomics: The luxury quality of a good LMS

Ergonomics and usability with Chamilo LMS. Sometimes Open Source software gets criticized for lacking behind proprietary software when talking about compelling interfaces. Many people in our community, after spending years with other solutions, describe our software, Chamilo LMS, as the easiest to use and to manage. We would like to take this opportunity to explain what lead us there. This all starts with a simple act: caring about ergonomics from the start.