For all those of you who've been expecting this release for a long time, we are finally closing in and this week seems to be the ideal time to have ourselves an first release candidate, which will last only one week of all goes well.
Unlike previous versions, Chamilo 1.8.8.4 doesn't bring any major new feature. Instead, it is the fruit of a very deep process of trials and fixes, which has been lasting more than 60 days now and sums up to a staggering 1000 of working hours. This time, we have felt Chamilo getting more popular and generating more contracts, but also getting into more organizations, with a big 200,000 people company in France adopting it and several multi-national companies with a very large number of offices using it for more and more critical resources, which have forced us to acquire very quickly a deep knowledge of redundancy, cloud computing and load balancing, which apparently we have done quite well as all our Chamilo customers are currently very happy and online 100% of the time.
In parallel, universities in Latin America and academies in France have started to contribute, which made it all wrap around us, developers of the platform. We've felt a little overwhelmed and those of us who we have the chance of counting as our customers must have felt it a little: our response time has extended a little for new proposals and (virtual or physical) meetings. We'd like to send our excuses to these people of whom we might have affected the projects that way.
Anyway, you should see Chamilo 1.8.8.4 as a very stable and improved platform which makes of 1.8.8 what we really wanted to make it in May this year: a complete, reliable and efficient e-learning authoring and distribution platform, ready for loads of teachers and students, with better translations, better icons, better screens, better reports, better tools (documents, certificates and exercises tools have been particularly taken care of) and finally, better documentation (both for admin and teachers) in French, English, Spanish and probably quickly enough in Dutch and German! In fact, this is the first version of Chamilo bringing so many excellent stuff that I have been able to hear a simultaneous "wow" from more than 100 teachers in a recent promotion event.
Because we wanted this to be vary stable version, we have also held up a whole lot of new features, that we will be rolling out in Chamilo 1.8.9 to come out (we hope) much before the end of the year. We really think that the new version will push the boundaries of what you thought possible from an e-learning system even further, but future will tell...
Of course, we'll be the first to cover the release of 1.8.8.4 when it's finally stable, but if you want to get a previous taste, have a look at http://chamilodev.beeznest.com using the login and password "admin".
