Chamilo 2.0 alpha 1 - [release name not defined], 2024-07-05
+
Chamilo 2.0 alpha 1 - Babaorum, 2024-07-18
Release notes - summary
-
Chamilo 2.0 is a major release that starts a new branch for the Chamilo software.
+
+ Chamilo 2.0 will be a major release, a new branch for the Chamilo software.
It is based on Chamilo 1.11.10 and includes tons of backend changes that will make
- developing Chamilo more "mainstream" in the future, by adopting more widely-known libraries,
- with the notable inclusions of Symfony as a main controller and framework (except for
- some legacy tools not yet converted) and VueJS as our main frontend framework.
- For the first time in more than 14 years (since its launch in 2010),
- Chamilo changes appearance, with a new and streamlined (open source) set of
- icons, and a design that will allow more flexibility and speed across devices.
+ developing Chamilo more "mainstream" and (hopefully) faster in the future,
+ by adopting more widely-known libraries, with the notable inclusions of Symfony
+ as a main controller and framework (except for some legacy tools not yet converted),
+ VueJS as our main frontend framework and TailwindCSS as our CSS framework.
+
+
+ For the first time in almost 15 years (since its launch in 2010),
+ Chamilo considerably changes appearance, with a new, foldable, left menu (meant
+ to improve space usage on mobile devices) and a streamlined (and open source) set of
+ icons, and a design that will allow more flexibility and speed across devices.
+
+
+ This is an ALPHA release, meaning it is not finished and is meant for testing and development
+ only. It should *NOT* be used in production unless you have a full-time dedicated IT team behind it.
+
+
+ An alpha version, to us, means that (except for unforeseen issues) the database structure is fixed
+ and the files structure is fixed (although some files could still be added/removed before the beta
+ release).
+
Release name
-
Not assigned yet
+
Babaorum (ficticious village name, see French art)
Messages: Added tag-based filtering your inbox/outbox.
+
Admin: Extra fields now have a description field, which allows you to show what you expect from users filling those.
+
CMS: Added CMS-type management of additional pages, including contact forms. A default install will add empty Home, FAQ, Demo and Contact pages)(16429423 - BT#20918).
+
Course homepage: Added possibility to re-order tools on course homepage.
+
Install: Added installation logs for better debug capabilities on install/migrations. Migrations can now be executed step by step if needed (f986f77d)
+
Admin: Added the roots of a role-based permissions system. Not functional yet but should be done by stable. Load through /permissions (not the definitive path) to get a sneak peak.
+
Calendar: Added collective events management in calendar (invite other users as participants to the event) [2021-07-14] (026d1163 - BT#18894)
+
Admin: Added pre-deletion of users as safeguard against user mistakes (7e917caf - GH#5097).
+
Admin: Privacy: Add auto-remove option to delete extra fields when anonymizing users (ff4ef19f - GH#5211).
+
Messages: Added search feature in message tool (2cf10c51 - BT#21705)
+
Announcement: Add event reminders to event created from announcement (b5e86d12 - BT#21582).
+
Admin: Added "News from Chamilo" and "Support" blocks (can be disabled) in the admin section. This will allow us to communicate with admins about updates, security updates and global events, between others, in a non-intrusive way.
+
Changed
+
Display: Completely changed the design (left menu, reduced top header) and icon set (harder to change but vectorial, color-editable and using one single open library: Material Design Icons).
+
Display: "My courses" and "My sessions" are now split into 2 different pages. If you only use one, only one appears, highly reducing confusion and increasing speed for portals with many courses/sessions.
+
Admin: All settings previously found in app/config/configuration.php have been moved to the platform settings interface or (for only a few ones) to .env in your Chamilo's root folder. There are now 720+ settings available to you through the admin interface. Not all settings are implemented yet. Most optional database changes related to those settings have been added to the database by default.
+
Install: Installation in sub-folders is not possible anymore. Using virtual hosts has become pain-free and cost-free compared to how it was 15 years ago. You will have to use vhosts or another LMS.
+
Install: When installing, you now need to point your DocumentRoot to the public/ directory, otherwise Chamilo will not work. However, .htaccess file support is now optional.
+
WYSIWYG: We have moved to TinyMCE (from CKEditor) due to CKEditor removing the possibility to edit HTML source (which we consider necessary) (53207cf9.
+
Language: Translations now use Gettext. New translation platform at translation.chamilo.org.
+
Internal: cidReq/sessionId/gidReq have been replaced by more sensible cid/sid/gid in URLs.
+
Internal: Documents are now referenced by id instead of path, which provides for more reliability.
+
Sessions: Sessions can now have multiple general coaches (including the possibility to have none).
+
Internal: Files management is now done through a wrapper and in a single writeable directory "var/" (will enable usage with cloud storage services in the future)
Database: All "name" fields have been renamed "title" for consistency across the system.
-
Database: As much as possible, tables containing records that had been deleted in Chamilo 1.* are migrated without such records. This means less "ghost" content, but also that the content deleted that way in Chamilo 1.* now has become completely unrecoverable.
+
Install: Updated minimum PHP version required to PHP 8.2
+
Calendar: Merged all calendar tools (global, course and personal events) for mainstream management.
Messages: Message attachment are no longer replicated the number of times they are received (for example through an announcement). This saves considerable space on large portals.
-
Plugins: Many plugins that seemed either unused or were not maintained by their maintainers. They could be included later on, and their tables have not been removed in the database, but they are not available in the list of plugins.
-
Wiki: The wiki tool is not available *yet*. It will be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
-
Blogs: The blogs tool is not available. It might be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
-
Dropbox: The dropbox tool is not available. It might be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
-
Global: Sub-folder mode: Chamilo 2 will not support being installed in a sub-folder. Nowadays, defining a subdomain has become very easy and provides higher security and more configuration flexibility, and supporting sub-folders is a complex task.
-
Display: Upon migration, the stylesheets are reset to the default Chamilo stylesheet. You will have to redesign your stylesheets using the stylesheets tool in the admin UI.
+
Admin: Remove courses/sessions icons from users list (very seldom used). Cut e-mail address shorter and add icon for full e-mail info on hover.
+
Database: As much as possible, tables containing records of objects that had been previously deleted in Chamilo 1.* are migrated without such records. This means less "ghost" content, but also that the content deleted that way in Chamilo 1.* now has become completely unrecoverable.
+
Internal: Resources (documents, tests, forums, etc) are now global and fully shareable between course contexts, which will allow us (in future versions) to have a central repository of resources to search and share reusable items.
+
Quiz: Add new generated audio file link in exercise notifications (dcc44158 - BT#21575).
+
Plugins: xAPI: xAPI plugin and LRS tables integrated into core entities (37aede9d - GH#2001).
+
Global: Added 'duration' field to many item types (course, learning paths, tests, attendances, assignments, ...). This will enable better reporting when activities must be based on "estimated time of completion" rather than tracked time.
+
Admin: The Multi-URL feature is now enabled by default on the admin page.
+
+
+
Fixed
+
+
Forum: Included all coaches in session notifications (f1c16adf - BT#21550).
+
Survey: Allowed tutors to access doodle past end date (e457b0e2 - BT#21622)
Known issues
-
DB title vs name fields: There have been *many* (several hundreds) database changes between v1.* and v2.0. These changes include renaming all "name" fields in all tables to "title", to follow a common standard. This particular change has required dozens of hours of expert work, because the "name" text is very common and the Chamilo 1.* was not *that* well structured. However, we may still have missed a few ones. If you find one, please report it as an issue in our repository.
Customizations of in-course tools (titles, icons, etc) at the course level are lost in migration.
+
Multi-URL does not work (fully) yet in this alpha release.
+
Wiki: The wiki tool is not available *yet*. It will be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
+
Course chat: The course chat tool is not available *yet*. It will be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
+
Plugins: Many plugins that seemed either unused or were not maintained by their maintainers were removed. They could be included again later on, and their tables have not been removed in the database if they had been installed in your 1.11.*, but they are not available in the list of plugins.
+
Plugins: Installing plugins is disabled in this alpha release. This should be fixed before beta 1.
+
Display: The Bootstrap (CSS) library has been removed. Some code might still use it. Should be fixed before stable.
+
Blogs: The blogs tool is not available. It might be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
+
Dropbox: The dropbox tool is not available. It might be included again in future versions, but there were too many changes required to include it in v2.0.
+
Display: Upon migration, the stylesheets are reset to the default Chamilo stylesheet. You will have to redesign your stylesheets using the stylesheets tool in the admin UI.
+
Courses list: Removed the ability to sort your own courses in a special list (too complex to support in combination with sessions).
+
Course catalogue: Not working properly. Will be fixed before stable.
+
Admin: Document templates have been removed. Previous templates were non-responsive. In this version, there will be no document templates by default, but you can add them easily in Admin > System templates.
+
diff --git a/public/documentation/installation_guide.html b/public/documentation/installation_guide.html
index 1d6e6ba3b1..024c15f4cd 100644
--- a/public/documentation/installation_guide.html
+++ b/public/documentation/installation_guide.html
@@ -19,26 +19,39 @@ This version of Chamilo requires the following software stack.
Within PHP, Chamilo requires or benefits from the following extensions:
-
session (php-session, usually shipped with PHP)
-
mysql
-
zip
-
zlib
-
pcre
-
xml
+
curl
+
exif
+
gd
+
iconv
intl
json
-
gd
-
curl
mbstring
-
exif
+
mysql
opcache
-
iconv
+
pcre
+
session (php-session, usually shipped with PHP)
+
xml
+
zip
+
zlib
ldap (optional)
xapian (optional)
-
Database
+
Web-panel installation
+
Database
+ Make sure you have a database available with full permissions.
+ Do not share that database with another application as Chamilo might need to create
+ a table that has the same name as a table in the other application.
+
Virtual host
+ Define a new virtual host/subdomain name you will use for Chamilo (Chamilo 2 does *not* work as a sub-folder of an existing website, you need a subdomain like "elearning.yourdomain.com").
+ Upload and/or unzip your Chamilo files inside your web folder (usually inside a folder called "public_html/").
+ Configure a virtual host pointing at the "public" directory inside your Chamilo directory. For example, this could be "/home/elearning.yourdomain.com/public_html/chamilo2/public/".
+
Installation wizard
+ You are ready to go. Open your browser on your subdomain (elearning.yourdomain.com in the example above), keep your database credentials at hand, and let the Chamilo installer guide you.
+
Command line installation
+
Database
You will need a database user with privilege to fully use (and optionally create) a database.
-Although progress has been made to support multiple database management systems, Chamilo currently only supports MariaDB and MySQL.
+Although progress has been made to support multiple database management systems, Chamilo
+currently only supports MariaDB and MySQL.
Setup a new user in your database system either through visual tools or directly in the terminal:
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON [db-name].* TO [db-user]@[db-host] IDENTIFIED BY '[db-password]';
@@ -53,14 +66,14 @@ where:
[db-host] is the name of the database server (use localhost when using the same machine for web server and database server - if you use a hosted service, your hosting provider will usually give you this name somewhere)
[db-password] is the password this user will use to connect to this database on this host. Use common sense to not make it too easy to guess (use special characters, lowercase and uppercase, numbers, and a length of *at least* 8 characters)
-
Web server
+
Web server
Chamilo 2+ only requires a working web server setup to work. You can run it on localhost with the default installation of any web server, provided you configure your DocumentRoot as the path pointing to Chamilo's public/ subfolder.
Here is a minimal example Apache vhost configuration file for an installation on the http://my.chamilo.local/ URL (replace all values between brackets, including the brackets, to your custom values):
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin [your-email]
ServerName [my.chamilo.local]
- DocumentRoot [/var/www/chamilo/public/]
+ DocumentRoot [/var/www/chamilo]/public/
# The following might not even be required
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/[my.chamilo.local]-error.log
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/[my.chamilo.local]-access.log combined
@@ -73,13 +86,15 @@ After setting up this virtual host, don't forget to enable it (example here on D
a2ensite [my.chamilo.local]
systemctl reload apache2
- Then you should be able to direct your browser to your URL (e.g. [http://my.chamilo.local]).
+
Installation wizard
+ You should now be able to direct your browser to your URL (e.g. [http://my.chamilo.local]).
Chamilo will pick it up from there and offer the installation wizard to help guide you through the rest of the process.
+