Contributing

Chamilo LMS is a free software, community-driven project.

Chamilo LMS is an LAMP-based e-learning web platform that focuses on providing an easy-to-use environment for teachers to improve both the quality and availability of their educational material, and on providing students with an awesome learning platform.

We are a relatively small development team and greatly welcome any contribution from the outside world, although we will thoroughly review them before integration, to make sure they do not introduce security vulnerabilities or degrade the ease of use of the platform.

The 1.10.x (that you're currently looking at) is a development branch for the 1.10.0 release, that we hope to be releasing around mid-2015. It is a transitional version that partially uses a series of Symfony 2 modules but relies heavily on Composer to manage the dependencies towards common libraries. Version 2.0 has already been worked a lot on, and has served as an inspiration for 1.10.0, but due to the huge success of the 1.9.x series, we decided to take a transitional step towards 2.0 to ensure a smooth migration of all our user base to the newer version (to be released sometime in 2016).

Contributing patches or new features

If you'd like to contribute to this project, please read the following document:

Coding conventions: The main conventions document
PSR-1: PSR-1 are standard conventions rules we use as a base (conversion of old code still in progress)
PSR-2: PSR-2 are more detailed standard conventions rules we use as base (conversion of old code still in progress)

In short, we expect contributions to be sent through Pull Requests, a very clean feature of Github. We recommend you follow this guide to understand a little more about the way it works: https://guides.github.com/activities/contributing-to-open-source/

Testing new features

As new major features are added, automated tests should be added that ensure that the feature continues to work in the foreseeable future.

In Chamilo, we rely on "Behat":http://docs.behat.org/en/latest/ to do Automated Behaviour Testing. You can find examples and information on how to run Behat tests in the tests/behat/ folder of your Chamilo installation.

Tests are run automatically for every new contribution, courtesy of "Travis-CI":https://travis-ci.org/, so you can follow your feature in time and see whether something breaks it. Check the Chamilo tests URL here: https://travis-ci.org/chamilo/chamilo-lms

Making changes to the database

If your changes require database changes, here are a few instructions on how to proceed. You will then need to submit these changes as explained above.

Database structure changes

If your changes are about structure, you want to follow these steps:

Create or modify an entity in src/Chamilo/CoreBundle/Entity/
Create a new Migration in src/Chamilo/CoreBundle/Migrations/Schema/V110/

This second step is most easily done by copying one of the current migration files in that directory. For example, if you're doing it on the 14th of July 2015 at noon:

Copy Version20150527120703.php to Version20150714120000.php
Edit the file and change any "20150527120703" you find to "20150714120000"
Check it works by issuing an update command from the command line:

php bin/doctrine.php migrations:execute 20150714120000 --up --configuration=app/config/migrations.yml

Database data changes

If you only want to change the data in the database, then you don't need to modify or create an entity, but you will still need to follow these two steps:

Modify the main/install/data.sql file (at the end, add a new section before the chamilo_database_version update
Create a new Migration in src/Chamilo/CoreBundle/Migrations/Schema/V110/ (see above section for details)

Testing through Docker

We are working on an official (production) image of Chamilo LMS for Docker. In the meantime, you can test development versions following more or less this procedure:

host$ composer run -it ubuntu:14.04.2
root@docker$ apt-get update
root@docker$ apt-get install -y git vim libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql php5-gd php5-intl php5-curl curl mysql-server mysql-client

Pick a password for the MySQL server and enter it twice, when prompted.

root@docker$ cd /var/www
root@docker$ rm -rf html
root@docker$ git clone --single-branch -b 1.10.0-beta https://github.com/chamilo/chamilo-lms.git html
root@docker$ cd html
root@docker$ chmod -R 0777 app/ vendor/ main/lang/ main/default_course_document/images/ web/
root@docker$ vim /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Look for timezone and modify it to the best timezone that suits you:

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
;date.timezone =
date.timezone = Europe/Brussels

Save and exit.

root@docker$ service apache2 reload
root@docker$ service mysql start
root@docker$ ifconfig | grep inet

Now you should be able to load Chamilo in your host machine's browser by loading the IP address showing on the first line of this command's results (and proceed with the installation on the MySQL server you configured above).

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