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.

Change the URL of a Chamilo portal copy

There is a surprising number of cases where you'd want to change the URL of a Chamilo portal, but the more common we see is when you take a backup copy of a portal and want to use that copy to build a new test portal. Obviously, if you keep the same URL, you're going to have difficulties having them both running at the same time. Chamilo is not good at managing several URLs (although another article on this blog will help you do that), and even less good at managing a dynamic URL, so there are 3 necessary steps to change the URL (this is valid at least until version 1.11 of Chamilo).

Upgrade Chamilo 1.9 to 1.11 through Git

If you are a developer or system administrator and you (wisely) manage some Chamilo portals through Git, you might want to upgrade, at some point, from Chamilo 1.9(.x) to Chamilo 1.11(.x). This is a complex process, for many reasons, so let me drive you through it.

Precautions

Before doing this, please take a backup of your files and database!

Branching

To avoid terminally breaking your current Chamilo portal, a good precaution is to start a new branch.
git checkout -b 1.11.x

Pulling the new code

Now, the biggest issue with pulling the code from 1.11.x is

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.

Odoo apps licensing

If you ever want to implement projects with Odoo and, like us, you are a bit itchy about non-free-software licenses and alternative BSD or LGPL-like licenses, you might want to know this. Odoo itself was previously (as OpenERP) AGPL, but it apparently (following David from Odoo S.A.

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.