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.

Remove permanent redirect (HTTP 301) cache in Firefox

As a web developer configuring SSL certificates on websites you deliver, as we do, you might be faced, one day, with a small issue about configuring a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS that has to be reverted. It so happens that browsers *really* take it to heart to cache an HTTP 301 (permanent redirect) message seriously and deeply. So much so that it might become very difficult to remove this redirect and ever be able to access the site in HTTP again.

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 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.

How to migrate from Claroline to Chamilo

On Wednesday 21st of January 2015, the UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain), through an e-mail from its rector's advisor and its co-rector for education and training, announced that it would abandon the development (and usage) of Claroline over a period of 18 months. There's a little mention about Claroline Connect being "immature" at this time, and a comparison between (exclusively) Claroline, Claroline Connect and Moodle in terms of the direction in which the UCL is going and the uniformization of its online education. They decided to go with Moodle for the foreseeable future.

The complete guide to screencasting in Ubuntu 14.04 + Gnome Shell

For those developers of you wanting to do more than just develop under Linux, you'll have realized that there are many things stopping you for doing proper video tutorials as easily as you would do it with some non-free (as in freedom) software. Fear not, though, as this tutorial, written at a time between Ubuntu 14.04 and 14.10 with the Gnome Shell, will help you go through it and hopefully setup a perfect environment that you will be able to re-use anytime, anywhere (with your laptop).

YouTube requirements

In order to prepare a good video tutorial, the first thing you need is: stan

Clean your Gallery 2 ImageBlockCacheMap table regularly

Supposedly, Gallery 2 has a process to clean this table periodically (through Cron, which you should always configure), but apparently sometimes this doesn't get to execute correctly. As a result, the rest of the cleanup will happen but this stable might not get cleaned, leading you to millions of rows of purely useless years-old cache junk. Fix it manually by issuing a "TRUNCATE [prefix]_ImageBlockCacheMap;" in your database, or install a more recent version of Gallery, or something like that, but make sure you always keep an eye on its size. Reference: http://galleryproject.org/node/30045