Chamilo 1 “LMS”, Chamilo 2 “LCMS Connect”, and the desambiguation

There’s been much talk over the last years about Chamilo 1 and 2, whether they were the same product, whether we were going to merge, etc.

Last month’s General Assembly of the Chamilo Association (which also made me the happy president of the association) helped us clarify a common line of conduct which, I am sure, most will appreciate.

If you’re in a hurry, you’d better move directly to the end of this article (“Conclusion”), because I want to drive you through the history of both projects now to give you a complete understanding of both pieces of software.

History of Chamilo 1 (now Chamilo LMS)

Chamilo LMS’s code starts to be written in 2001. A little before the first traces you might find about Moodle, so yes, in a way Chamilo is the older brother of Moodle (how about that, now?). It is born in the Université Catholique de Louvain as the Claroline project.

In 2004, one of the founders of the Claroline project decides to fork the software to give it a increased focus on businesses, and launches the D0keos company. It could have been the Claroline company, launched as a spin-up of the university, but for human reasons it was not something the different people involved agreed on, so the new D0keos project was born, and an infamous e-mail was sent by the new D0keos founder to all the Claroline community, stating that “The Claroline project is dead, long live D0keos” (which was, obviously, not true – Claroline still lives today).

The software (which is still the basis of Chamilo LMS) continued to be developed, with many changes and improvements, until 2009. During that period, the D0keos tried (but somehow failed, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing all this) to develop a spirit of community. Somehow, it partially reached that objective, with a considerable involvement of mine, but decisions taken by the head of the company had the particular characteristic of pissing the community off and in 2008 it started using the nerves of the business partners as well, until in 2009, most of them (community and partners) decided the continuous lack of consistency in the lead’s actions and opinions should stop affecting the software, the community and the businesses of his partners, and decided to launch Chamilo (in early 2010, although the decision had already been taken by the end of 2009).

Since then, and in only 2 years time, without external funding, the Chamilo community has grown to 1 million users worldwide, pretty much the same results as D0kkeos in 5 years time, albeit with a more widespread internet connectivity.

As you understand, this project (Chamilo LMS) is using the same codebase as in 2001 and shares many elements with the Claroline and the D0keos projects, but has since then been reworked to include many practical Web 2.0 tools for the teachers, which make his work much easier today. It has also received many SCORM improvements, tracking fixes and social networks integrations, altogether keeping the previous visual structure which make it possible for organizations to migrate easily from one version to another, without having to train their teachers again. Many aspects of the backend have been optimized (the next version comes with huge database structure improvements and great security filters which don’t prevent the teachers from doing their work).

Chamilo LMS is the one used on https://campus.chamilo.org and chances are that if someones tells you about Chamilo, they’re talking about this version. It represents 98% of our user base (of our community) in 2014.

Definitely, you could say that Chamilo LMS is a project that built its features for the masses, providing great tools, with great reliability and security, and that is continuing to improve by the day (I just checked and we have had 900 changes in the code in the last 30 days…).

So while the 2.0 (or as we will see, the “LCMS Connect”) project exists, Chamilo LMS will continue being developed at least for the next two years (and there will be support for it at least for the next 4 years, so fear not).

Chamilo LMS’s development is managed by companies spread over Belgium, Spain and Perú, and backed up by the universities of Grenoble (France), Pau (France), Carlos II (Spain), Genève (Switzerland), Tocantíns (Brazil) and San Ignacio de Loyola (Peru).

History of Chamilo 2 (now Chamilo LCMS Connect)

Chamilo 2, or at least its concept, was first designed in 2006 by a team of (mostly Belgian, as was Claroline) university teachers and students as a way to redesign D0keos and increase its flexibility. It was, at the time, thought to become, at some point, D0keos 1.7 (the current version was 1.6). However, due to the innovative nature of the project (and its development team) and the little resources assigned to its development, the project soon felt into dismay and, two years later (2007), as the mainstream project released a new major version (called 1.8), it was decided the project would be reviewed and relaunched as D0keos 1.9.

Sadly, the same fate stroke D0keos 1.9 and it was never actually released. In late 2008, it was decided the project would embark more redesign and be coined D0keos 2.0. Before this version was out, a split occured and the Chamilo project was decided to be launched, with the expectation that what had been developed until then as D0keos 2.0 would be released as Chamilo (the first ever real version of the software to be released).

However, because of a lack of resources again, the team could not deliver and it was decided that, on the 18th of January 2010, the Chamilo project would be announced to the public with version Chamilo 1.8.6.2, which was the continuation of the D0keos project, as a way to give Chamilo 2.0 more time to get ready. Being two different software bases, it is currently too difficult for both development teams to join efforts without loosing months of work and thus affecting you, the users.

In December 2010, Chamilo 2.0 was released as a first stable version, but many reported that, although the features it offered were certainly interesting, it still lacked the usability of Chamilo 1.8, and we temporarily decided to stop promoting 2.0 so that the team could focus on a better released. This is how Chamilo 2.1 came to be in January 2012, which was more stable.

Chamilo LCMS Connect’s development is mostly coordinated by the Hoogeschool University College of Gent, Artevelde Hoogeschool, Erasmus Hoogeschool and Vrije Universiteit of Brussels (all of them in Belgium, all of them mainly Flemish-speaking academical institutions).

Although the original idea was to redesign the whole software and enjoy the usefulness of object-oriented programming from the ground up, a series of untimely or inadequate decisions have slowed down the development of LCMS and its reaching maturity. A few of these:

• (too) early split of the code into one core and about 50 “modules”, which in consequence are not ideally maintained, generating a series of commits that should logically only be made at the top level of the inheritance schema, but that need to be “propagated” to about 50 modules
• lacking documentation and very high complexity of the code structure, making it complicated to delve into in less than a full-time week, and very complicated to master in less than a few months (most of new Chamilo LMS developers get their first hack ready in less than a day)
• badly known history of the project, leading to late major rewrite of the database layer (already resolved in 2009, but still surprising at the time)
• no decision taken, nor priority set on how to manage translations in order to allow for external translators (without developers knowledge) to contribute (that’s an issue since 2010, and still is in 2014)

Apart from these, the progress has been taking up speed since the integration as an important part of the team of Koen Favere, a technologically savvy teacher in one of the academies involved, who saw the sheer necessity of better communication and respect between the different development teams and between developers and teachers (the main users of such systems). Since then, the coordination of developments has taken shape and progress is finally percievable.

Lately, with Chamilo LCMS version 4, the system is more stable and the major issues are still its complexity (both at user level and at development level). Chamiluda 2013 and the presence of teachers members of the community has helped me understand that there is a market for such complex solutions, albeit very specific to high-end education environment (in my view only available to a very little minority, still). For those wanting to have highly customizable solutions with the possibility to integrate content from several different sources (what Blackboard calls its “mashups”), LCMS is definitely worth a run!

Conclusion

Because of the numbering in the versions (Chamilo 1 & Chamilo 2), people tend to be *very confused* (and this is an understatement) about the drastic changes of interface, the lack of translations to other languages than English and Dutch of LCMS (being worked on for the last 2 years without much results, I must say) and the missing features in comparison to version 1.8.8.4. This worries most of our users.

Well, that’s because these really are two, completely different pieces of software, developed by different teams (although they are in active communication to share best practices and decisions) for different environments. Although the objective of version 2 was to make things so flexible we could reach different environments with the same software, it still needs a little bit of time to get there.

During the 2012 General Assembly, it was made clear that our goals (as two different teams) were still different, and we thus decided it was time to remove the ambiguous character of that naming mistake we did 2 years before.

What was previously known as Chamilo 1 will now be officially named Chamilo LMS, and Chamilo LCMS Connect will be the name of the parallel project which was previously called Chamilo 2.1.

This will soon show up on our website, as long as a set of characteristics for each, so people understand better what they’re getting out of the Chamilo project, be it through Chamilo LMS or Chamilo LCMS Connect.

Also, decisions have now been taken in common by the two teams to move towards a slow integration by re-using the same pieces of software at the core of both applications. This should vastly benefit the implementors of Chamilo as we will re-use more pieces of the Symfony framework, which means people working with Symfony directly or with other pieces of software using pieces of Symfony themselves (like Drupal 8) will be more easily able to tune Chamilo to their needs in the future.

As a reminder, Chamilo differs greatly from its predecessors though three very important decisions:

• the trademark is owned by a non-profit association, governed by 5 different people of various countries and activities
• official providers can only become providers once they have contributed something, which means they will be much more likely to contribute in the future (the learning curve is acquired since the very start)
• official providers have to pass an exam, which includes understanding what free software means for their business

You can contact the Chamilo Association at any time at info_at_chamilo.org for more information about the project, or BeezNest (official provider) for quotes at sales@beeznest.com

Historia de Chamilo, para los curiosos

Como esta pregunta reaparece de vez en cuando y que tengo el privilegio de poder contarla en más detalles que cualquier otra persona (por haber tenido la suerte de estar en los buenos lugares en los buenos momentos), este artículo (que irá mejorándose con el tiempo) cuenta una historia larga… una historia de 10 años por lo menos. Una historia de gloria y de drama, la historia de un LMS de software libre.

En el año 2001 (en realidad un poco antes) nace el proyecto Claroline. Aunque se indica en el historial de Moodle que ya existía a partir del 1998, hoy en día solo se puede encontrar la existencia de alguna “huella digital” de Moodle en sus propios repositorios a partir de Agosto del 2001. A cambio, se encuentra historia de Claroline a partir de Febrero del 2001. En este año, Th0mas de Praetere lanza el proyecto Claroline, con el financiamiento para la innovación de la “Région Wallonne”, una de las regiones de mi bonito (pero lluvioso) país de Bélgica. Este financiamiento garantiza a Claroline 4 años de actividad de 4 miembros de personal que trabajarán en el marco de la Université Catholique de Louvain.

En el año 2003, el fundador de este proyecto, en esta época profesor de filosofía en la misma universidad, propone a sus superiores llevar el proyecto Claroline hacia las empresas, para sacarlo del marco puramente unuversitario en el cual no se logran muchos objetivos, y hacer de ello un negocio entero, spin-off de la universidad. Sus jefes, muy interesados (quizás demasiado) por el proyecto, registran la marca sin informarlo de lo mismo, y aceptan su proyecto pero le informan que tendrá que pagar un derecho por uso de la marca… Como todos saben, una start-up tiene muchas dificultades en sus primeros años de vida, y cargar el peso del pago de royalties no es la mejor decisión que se pueda tomar.

Por lo tanto, el mismo fundador decide lanzar el proyecto D0keos en el 2004. Como Claroline era software libre (GNU/GPLv2), podía ser libremente copiado, modificado y redistribuido. Por lo tanto, D0keos es una modificación y redistribución del software Claroline, lo que es totalmente legal. Esta iniciativa valdrá al mismo profesor su despido de la universidad (bonita mentalidad), lo que también lo imposibilitará a continuación seguir dictando filosofía en otras universidades (es muy grave un despido de profesor universitario en Bélgica).

Me junte al proyecto D0keos en el 2004, trabajando a distancia (desde Inglaterra) y a tiempo muy parcial inicialmente (4h por semana), como empleado freelance, mi carga de trabajo aumentando poco a poco a lo largo de los años. Inicialmente eramos 2 desarrolladores. El primero salió del proyecto, dejándome prácticamente solo con ayuda muy ocasional de otros. En el 2005, participo a la preparación de una licitación pública que asegura un ingreso considerable a la empresa (no tanto como el financiamiento inicial del proyecto) por los 4 años siguientes.

El proyecto D0keos empezó a encontrar un éxito mayor alrededor del 2006 paralelamente a una aumentación considerable de mi tiempo de trabajo, lo que permite, en inicios del año 2007, de lanzar la versión 1.8 de D0keos, con cambios importantes (entre otros la re-escritura completa del código del lector SCORM, que llegará a ser una herramienta fundamental para el éxito futuro del proyecto). En el 2006 se juntan nuevos desarrolladores, entre otros E. Marguin, desarrollador Francés que luego renunciará en el 2008 para finalmente regresar a trabajar sobre D0keos (en el 2010). A lo largo de los años, el excelente equipo que formamos Th0mas y yo alcanzamos objetivos muy altos y el futuro del proyecto se anuncia maravilloso.

Por mientras, en la obscuridad crece el engaño. A lo largo de los años, nos damos cuenta también que el mundo de las plataformas e-learning es un mundo complicado, en el cual es necesario luchar para mantenerse en flotación. En el 2008 y 2009, debido a problemas personales importantes del genitor del proyecto, la gestión de la empresa se va de cabeza y los socios (otras empresas) tienen más y más problemas para colaborar. Al mismo tiempo, la crisis financiera surge, nuevos competidores aparecen y el mercado es más difícil de expandir. Estas razones empujan el genitor de D0keos a tratar de encontrar nuevas formas de vender.

En este camino algo oscuro surge la idea de la “versión profesional” de D0keos: una versión para las empresas que tienen los recursos para invertir en herramientas más poderosas. En un inicio, pareció ser una buena idea: generó en sus primeros meses mucho más interés de parte de pequeñas y medianas empresas. Pero la diferencia de precio entre la versión gratuita y la versión profesional parece ser un freno considerable a la adopción de esta última, y en realidad en 2 años no se vendieron muchas.

Paralelamente, en el 2007, me mudo (desde Inglaterra) a Perú donde lanzo la empresa D0keos Latinoamérica que luego (en el 2010) renombraría BeezNest Latino. La visión de esta empresa es bastante (y todavía lo es) altruista: proveer una dimensión multi-continental a D0keos y permitir un desarrollo más sostenido con costos menores, al servicio de este excelente software que permitía a tanta gente organizar y mejorar sus cursos, o seguir cursos en línea.

Lo malo es que en esta época oscura, surge una idea en la mente del mismo genitor del proyecto, que nunca le perdonaré y que causará el fin de nuestra colaboración: el hecho de promover, en la versión de pago exclusivamente (es decir esconderlas en la otra), funcionalidades a las cuales la comunidad había contribuido (la importancia de estas contribuciones no era lo preocupante, sino el simple hecho de considerarlo como una posibilidad y pedirme de ejecutarla). Trás una discusión bastante animada en Junio del 2009, decidimos mutualmente frenar nuestra colaboración poco a poco, lo que hicimos a lo largo de los 6 meses siguientes.

En setiembre del 2009, de viaje en Bélgica, fui recibido “in extremis” (me anularon 2 veces la reunión antes de darmela el último día de mi estadía) por los “nuevos directores” de D0keos. En esta reunión me pidieron mis expectativas como socio de D0keos. Les expliqué que necesitaba una mejor comunicación y la posibilidad de seguir concentrándome en el desarrollo del software sin tener a cada rato que recuperar cliente y negociar con la comunidad sobre las cosas que les queriamos “robar”. Me propusieron darles 3 meses para armar un plan. Nos acordamos en este plazo y me fui de la reunión con muchas dudas. Era el 11 de setiembre del 2009 (quizás un símbolo oscuro). El 10 de diciembre envié un correo para pedir cual era su propuesta. Nunca obtuve respuesta a este correo.

El 12 de diciembre me decidí por fin a aceptar la propuesta de muchos más de liderar el lanzamiento del proyecto Chamilo como fork (derivación) del proyecto D0keos.

Así nació el proyecto Chamilo oficialmente en Enero del 2010. En todo el periodo del 12 de diciembre al 18 de enero, estuvimos trabajando como locos para sacar una versión estable mejorada de la última versión (1.8.6.1) que habíamos desarrollado para D0keos, bajo la influencia exclusiva de una serie de profesores de varios orígenes y de dos clientes de la empresa peruana. La llamamos Chamilo 1.8.6.2. Para evitar los mismos errores del pasado, fundamos una asociación conformada de 7 directores y miembros con derecho a voto, que mantienen una neutralidad en todas las decisiones de promoción y los proyectos internos al proyecto Chamilo, apoyando los socios y generando un mejor marco de colaboración entre ellos.

Obviamente, el año 2010 fue un año lleno de dificultades. Además de estar saliendo de la crisis financiera (y por lo tanto enfrentarnos a presupuestos congelados de todas partes – y seguramente en el sector de la educación), nos enfrentamos a la dificultad del lanzamiento de un nuevo producto y una nueva marca, Chamilo, desconocido de todos, cuando los últimos años los habíamos pasado promocionando de forma intensiva la marca D0keos. En BeezNest Latino, reducimos el personal de 14 a 4 (aunque produciendo raramente prácticamente lo mismo) y gestionamos todo esto en situación de crisis. El 2011 vió un desarrollo un poco distinto con más interés ya en el proyecto Chamilo, y poco a poco Chamilo se volvió un negocio nuevamente.

Pero esta vez un negocio responsable, sin engaños, sin decisiones escondidas, sin falsos esfuerzos de comunicación[1]. Hemos, en realidad, salvado moralmente al excelente proyecto D0keos, pero tuvimos que renombrarlo en el medio…

En los años 2010 y 2011, más de US$75,000 (cada año) se inyectaron directamente en Chamilo a través de BeezNest Belgium y BeezNest Latino (y no somos los únicos contribuyentes, también colaboran otras personas, asosciaciones y empresas) en desarrollo (mayormente) y promoción (un poco). Parte de este monto proviene de clientes, parte de inversión propia de BeezNest[2], en hacer de Chamilo un mejor producto, obviamente para acceder a mejores mercados profesionales y poder crecer, porque son dos empresas con fines de lucro (moderado).

Ahora llegamos al 2012, y me toca preparar un resumen de lo logrado en el 2011. Pues hemos mantenido un ritmo de más de 1,000 nuevos usuarios por día (casi 1300 en promedio) como lo muestra http://version.chamilo.org/community.php

Seguiré agregando más detalles a esta historia, pero este es una primera versión que, por no ser completa, por lo menos es precisa y exacta. Espero la hayan disfrutado.

Yannick

[1] Unas “jugadas” de este otro proyecto: “es una plataforma HTML5” (no lo es), “pensada para tablets” (solo tiene unos iconos más grandes), “es usada por 4 milliones de personas” (no lo es, lo se, encontré los errores en el script de seguimiento a la época), “es software libre” (técnicamente está al limite de no serlo, impide a otros compartir su código de forma útil: ningún acceso atómico a arreglos de bugs, haciendo obligatorio el pasar por la empresa para poder acceder a la base de informaciones correspondiente), y tantas más que malogran la buena imagen del software libre (a lo menos desde mi punto de vista, que penseis?).

[2] (y una parte muy muy diminuta de las contribuciones a la asociación Chamilo, con las cuales invertimos en un servidor y un nuevo sitio web)

Inspiración para el desarrollo de Chamilo

Extracto de algo que escribí para Learning Review en el 2009. Ahora cambiamos de nombre y somos Chamilo, con la misma idea…

Simplicidad de uso es la fuerza mayor de Chamilo [ndlr: eraDokeos]. Al ser una plataforma de uso simple, permite que el usuario no se pierda dentro de la herramienta. Nos enfocamos a guiarlo directamente dentro de sus cursos, con pocas cosas para distraerlo fuera de ellos. Además, realizamos una herramienta de calidad, que permite, entre otras cosas, que los docentes puedan crear cursos rápidamente con un esfuerzo mínimo y un resultado máximo en términos de aprendizaje del alumno.

Consideramos que desarrollar esta plataforma de código abierto, es nuestro aporte en la construcción de un mundo mejor, al permitir a quienes no cuentan con capacidad financiera para hacer una inversión en un sistema de e-learning privado, acceder a esta plataforma con todos sus elementos, sin otro costo que el esfuerzo humano para instalarla y la voluntad de usarla.

Creemos que la mejora de todos pasa por la educación de cada uno, y que todos tenemos el derecho a una educación con las mejores herramientas. No sólo en cuanto a costos se refiere, sino desde un enfoque de accesibilidad para personas con dificultades. Creemos que cumplir con este objetivo mediante la metodología del software libre, nos permite brindar una plataforma que responde mejor a las necesidades de los docentes y alumnos.

History of Chamilo releases

Just to keep a personal reference somewhere digital and where it could also be used by others, here is a list of Chamilo releases/versions and the corresponding dates (and files links):

• 2016-03-22 Chamilo 1.10.4
• 2015-12-22 Chamilo 1.10.2
• 2015-10-16 Chamilo 1.10.0
• 2015-03-19 Chamilo 1.9.10.2
• 2015-01-25 Chamilo 1.9.10
• 2014-06-16 Chamilo 1.9.8
• 2013-06-04 Chamilo 1.9.6
• 2013-01-18 Chamilo 1.9.4
• 2013-10-10 Chamilo 1.9.2
• 2013-08-27 Chamilo 1.9.0
• 2012-01-19 Chamilo LCMS 2.1
• 2011-08-28 Chamilo 1.8.8.4
• 2011-05-31 Chamilo 1.8.8.2
• 2011-05-06 Chamilo 1.8.8
• 2010-12-20 Chamilo LCMS 2.0
• 2010-07 Chamilo 1.8.7.1
• 2010-06-01 Chamilo 1.8.7
• 2010-01-18 Chamilo 1.8.6.2
• 2009-09-01 Dokeos 1.8.6.1
• 2009-06-02 Dokeos 1.8.6
• 2008-06-14 Dokeos 1.8.5
• 2007-09 Dokeos 1.8.4
• 2007-0? Dokeos 1.8.3
• 2007-0? Dokeos 1.8.2
• 2007-05 Dokeos 1.8.0
• 2007 Dokeos 1.7-RC1 (never released, was originally a university-only initiative)
• 2006-07 Dokeos 1.6.5
• 2006-04 Dokeos 1.6.4
• 2006-02 Dokeos 1.6.3
• 2005-09 Dokeos 1.6.2
• 2005-08 Dokeos 1.6.1
• 2005-07 Dokeos 1.6
• 2005 Dokeos 1.5.5

It makes me feel a bit old, but I’m happy to report I’ve been an important part of each and every one of these releases. Now you probably understand why I don’t feel particularly enthusiastic about migrating from a 1.8.4 version to a 1.8.8.4 version. I know the number is quite close, but there’s still around 4 years of development between these two!

e-learning platforms list

Just as a reference for later (in alphabetical order) – this list was originally quickly composed as part of the planning of a comparative study which was not concluded:

Open Source:

• A-Tutor
• Canvas LMS
• Chamilo
• Claroline
• Docebo
• Dokeos
• eLMS
• Ilias
• Moodle
• OLAT
• Sakai
• .LRN

Non Open Source:

• Angel (now Blackboard)
• Blackboard
• CourseMill
• e-Doceo
• e-Ducativa
• SharePoint LMS
• TotalLMS
• WebCT

Migrating from Dok€os to Chamilo, quick guide

To respect the wishes of the trademark holder, Dok€os(TM) is not mentioned by its true trademark in the article below, and will simply be replaced by “Dok”. Any resemblance to an existing LMS would be totally fortuitous.

For all of you worried about how to migrate from Dok to Chamilo and until when you’ll be able to do it, here’s a quick introduction to the idea.

Chamilo 1.8.6.2, the first version of Chamilo ever, is in fact what should have been Dok 1.8.6.2 if it had ever come out. As most of the development team moved away from the project to Chamilo, you can consider Chamilo 1.8.6.2 as the real next version of Dok. and all following versions as the real continuation of the project philosophy. This has a series of practical advantages:

1. you can easily upgrade any Dok. portal up to 1.8.6.1 to Chamilo (any 1.x version, recommending the latest stable version)
2. you can easily copy a course from Dok. (up to 1.8.6.1) to Chamilo (any 1.x version)
3. you can easily copy part of a course from Dok. (up to 1.8.6.1) to Chamilo (any 1.x version)
4. you get all the good things from the first + the good things from Chamilo in one single application

The general procedure for upgrading your portal to Chamilo is just as you would upgrade from one version of Dok. to the next.

The general procedure to copy course content is to go to the course, go to the Course Maintenance tool, select “Create course backup” and pick the elements you want. Download the course backup, create a course in any Chamilo portal, go to the Course Maintenance tool, select Import course backup and insert the backup file. You might have to increase the authorized upload file limit on your Chamilo portal if your backup is weighting more than 20MB.

Considering Dok 2.0 is near and diverges a little from Chamilo, it will probably not be easily possible to migrate from this version to Chamilo, so you have to make a choice *before* you migrate to Dok.2.0. Of course, if you’ve already made the wrong choice and want to migrate, do not hesitate to contact us to see how we can rescue your data with a professional service guarantee.

That’s it! Don’t hesitate to ask if you got more questions.

4 años de actividad de código de chamilo en 1 minuto

¡Migra tu plataforma a Chamilo, también es muy fácil!

Hola soy Carlos Vargas, continuando con los artículos para migrar de Dokeos a Chamilo, en esta ocasión voy a explicar como migrar todo un campus desde ciertas versiones de Dokeos a Chamilo sin ningún problema, cabe resaltar que este artículo es de mayor interés para administradores de plataformas Dokeos, a los cuales los invitamos a formar parte de Chamilo. Lo que voy a explicar a continuación también es válido para migrar de una versión de Dokeos a otra, además explicaré como exportar usuarios, cursos y hasta sesiones, salvo que algunos de estos exportes están disponibles solo a partir de Chamilo 1.8.6.2

¡Empezemos!

Si tienes instalado un Dokeos en tu servidor y quieres migrarlo a otra versión, lo que muchos usuarios han hecho es borrar toda su plataforma y volver a hacer todo de nuevo, es más, en el mundo hay varias instalaciones de Dokeos 1.8.4 o 1.8.5, que los administradores no actualizan, simplemente porque no quieren perder sus contenidos, al final eso es un poco absurdo, no tiene sentido usar un software que nunca vas a poder actualizar, y esto se debe a la ignorancia de las ventajas y funcionalidades que hemos ofrecido desde Dokeos.

Lo primero que hay que hacer para actualizar tu plataforma a una versión superior es asignarle permisos a las carpetas de los archivos de instalación y configuración, la cual al terminar de instalar Dokeos, se recomienda lo siguiente “Para proteger su sitio, configure main/inc/conf/configuration.php y main/install/index.php como archivos de sólo lectura (CHMOD 444)”. Pues bien, justamente a estas carpetas hay que darle nuevamente los permisos (777) para poder modificar el archivo de configuración y poder ejecutar la actualización.

Para saber si tienes la última versión del software, en el panel de administración, en la parte inferior derecha, aparece un botón que dice: “Activar la verificación de versiones”, al darle clic, puede aparecer el mensaje “Su versión no está actualizada. La última versión es Dokeos 1.8.6.1. Su versión es Dokeos 1.8.6. Por favor, visite Dokeos”, si tienes la 1.8.6.1, dirá que tu plataforma está actualizada, sin embargo recuerden que Chamilo es un nuevo proyecto, asi que esta advertencia será válida para Chamilo, cuando salga la versión 1.8.7, eso será muy pronto.

Por otro lado debes descargar la última versión de Chamilo 1.8.6.2 Salto, disponible en nuestro sitio web http://www.chamilo.org/es/download, y darle clic a la descarga de la versión: 1.8.6.2 estable (al lado está la versión 2.0 aún en desarrollo).

Una vez descargado el archivo, aunque no lo creas debes descomprimirlo encima de los ficheros actuales /var/www/chamilo/ (esta forma es para servidores en Linux) o quizas C:\\xampp\httdocs\www\chamilo u otra dependiendo del servidor de aplicaciones y sistema operativo que uses. Una vez sobrepuestos los archivos ya no podrás usar el campus, es ahí cuando debes empezar la migración, para ello debes escribir en la url, despues del dominio que tenga tu campus, la dirección de instalación por ejemplo http://www.campus.com/main/install, es decir debes añadir main/install (si hacías esto antes, el sistema no lo iba a permitir pues la carpeta no tenía permisos) luego volverás al formulario de instalación, pero omitiendo algunos pasos.

Primero debes seleccionar el idioma, en la siguiente página salen los requerimientos necesarios, abajo salen cuatro botones: “previous”, “New installation”, “Upgrade from Dokeos 1.8.x”, “Upgrade from Dokeos 1.6.x”. Para este caso debes tener cuidado y escoger el tercero “Upgrade from Dokeos 1.8.x” que justamente se trata de actualizar tu plataforma a 1.8.x, pues Chamilo sigue siendo 1.8. Después debes confirmar el directorio principal, luego saldrá nuevamente la licencia GNU/GPL. Igual que en la instalación, confirmar la base de datos, siguiente, siguiente “Install Chamilo” y listo.

Asi de simple es migrar a una nueva versión y mantener tus usuarios cursos etc. Los cursos creados en la versión anterior mantendrán sus contenidos y las nuevas herramientas en la versión actual aparecerán desactivadas, solo debes darle clic en el ojo.

Ahora bien, en el artículo anterior explique lo fácil que era migrar tu curso de una plataforma a otra, este trabajo lo puede hacer el mismo profesor del curso, sin embargo, el profesor no puede importar a los alumnos que estaban inscritos en su curso (esto lo digo en respuesta a un comentario en el artículo anterior).

Sin embargo el adminstrador de la plataforma, puede exportar en un fichero a todos los miembros de su plataforma, este fichero puede ser de dos tipos: XML/CSV y de la misma manera como se puede exportar, también se puede importar, para esto la solución es muy fácil: Si no quieres migrar tu plataforma con tus cursos quizas porque son obsoletos u otra cosa, pero si quieres recuperar los usuarios, es decir para que estén en la nueva plataforma sin tener que registrarse nuevamente, debes usar esta función. Entonces en el panel de administracíon de Dokeos exportas a los usuarios, para ello aparecerá un formulario para seleccionar el tipo del archivo de exporte (XML y CVS) y podrás descargar el archivo, o para un caso específico, puedes escoger exportar solo a los usuarios de un curso en particular.

Para la importación hay que hacer lo opuesto, pero es así de simple. En Chamilo, entras al panel de administración y haces clic en importar fichero CVS/XML, seleccionas el tipo que vas a subir, cargas el fichero y listo, aunque aqui surge un pequeño problema, es que cuando se crea la cuenta para un usuario, entre sus datos hay uno que obligatorio, pero que está encriptado, obviamente me refiero a la contraseña, por temas se seguridad usamos uno de los tipos de encriptación MD5 o SHA1, estas encriptaciones son irreversibles, razón por la cual no se pueden exportar, pues en la base de datos esta la contraseña encriptada. La solución larga es entrar a cada cuenta y generar una nueva clave, o sino que el mismo usuario solicite una nueva contraseña ingresando su correo y su nombre de usuario. Puedes olvidar todo esto sobre las contraseñas si al instalar tu Dokeos donde dice seleccionar tipo de encriptación escogiste “Ninguna”. También es posible enviar un correo a los usuarios ya que uno de los campos es justamente de la dirección de correo electrónico.

En Chamilo 1.8.7, también será posible exportar e importar cursos con un fichero CSV o XML, para evitar volver al crearlos, y tener tus cursos (vacios de conenido) en tu nuevo campus.

Como siempre esperaré sus comentarios y aportes gracias.

Exit Dokkeos, Enter Chamilo

Those of you watching closely the Dokeos code will have noticed… I stopped contributing to the project in December 2009, along with my team of 12 and all of our fellow community members. The only changes we sent were actually customer requirements, so no way to avoid that. But that’s it.

I officially stopped working with Dokeos on January 1st, 2010. As many huge actors in the open-source (MySQL/MariaDB, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, …) and PHP development world at the end of 2009, it was time for a big change. On one side I think it is just sad to let go of something you’ve been involved in with so much of your love, sweat and personal motivation. On another side, there was no possible compromise between a company that strengthened its fist around the open-source software neck a little bit more each year.

I started working with Dokeos for a reasonable hourly fee in 2004, and continued working (for the same fee all along, that is) until the very end of 2009. But I accepted the conditions were somehow something I could accept in exchange for the possibility to work on free open-source software full-time. Well… It wasn’t really full time at first (more or less 10 hours a week), then it became full time in 2006 and became an unbearably high load in 2007, then I started hiring people to help me.

Hiring people is not easy. You have to find the right ones… the chosen ones. The ones that would do the things exactly like you under the same conditions, or that would do them differently, but with the same results. Or even without the same results but for the same reasons. Anyway… it is a wonderfully complicated process. Even more when you want to achieve something for the software you are desperately involved in. That’s what I did. That’s why we are now a 12-people strong company that’s producing more FLOSS than any other company here in Perú (and possibly than a whole lot of supposedly open-source companies around Latin America). That’s where following a dream can lead you, and that’s also why accepting conditions opposed to your dreams is not an option when you reached that level.

Dokeos was a very simple application when I started working on it. And I was a very unskillful developer at that time. In 6 months time, I managed to get much more qualified and understand the complex processes of PHP and HTTP. In one year time I was Zend Certified and started writing articles about PHP and web development. In two years time I had become Dokeos’ lead developer.

In 4 years time I had become the leader of a development company that would represent Dokeos and spread the Dokeos trademark and quality image throughout Latin America, injecting all benefits into the open-source software. Then, apparently, the Dokeos company considered this wasn’t as good enough for them, so instead of them embracing the opportunity I was offering (of showing off a very productive international extension), I was asked to contribute a fee to use the trademark (that we had been developing ourselves since 2007 – see Google Trends).

Then, right in the middle of 2009, we reached breaking point. We argued (me and the Dokeos leadership) about the very principle of using and developing FLOSS and the fact that it wasn’t worth upsetting the community by removing a bunch of useless features to appear in a “professional” version rather than “adding” true, worthy features in a special compilation.

The problem was an ethical problem all along: removing existing features, be they only in the beta version of Dokeos, implied people from the community had already contributed to these features through feedback or patches, and we were just stealing their work to get a few more lines on a marketing folder about the pro version. Just not worth it in my point of view. I remember commenting (I don’t know if in June or later in September) that if he really wanted to move things like that, then I couldn’t see why I should follow him, and that I would probably launch a fork to avoid the software dying this way (which was an unweighted comment at the time – obviously not that far out).

A little bit later, and in an unrelated aspect, as a group of three main providers for the Dokeos company, we asked for better communication and planning in our work with Dokeos. All denied. It became worst. Less communication, less planning. We wouldn’t know when someone new was joining the team or leaving it, except by talking with the person itself. We wouldn’t know when a customer was a  customer. No information about what type of contract he had or the remaining amount of hours of support. This became a nightmare to manage.

In response to our requests (or should I say suggestions), the Dokeos company asked for all the developments to be planned and a budget to be established. Sadly, this implied bigger investments still, to work for Dokeos (where I don’t object about planning and budgeting, we had so far pretty much tried to get full agile, developing and reporting frequently, with less long-term planning, as a reflection of what customers needed). Several of us calculated the cost of providing services to Dokeos were actually higher than what we charged (in short, we were investing in Dokeos instead of providing profitable services).

This would all have been more acceptable to me if we had received some kind of guarantee that we would have our word to say on the future of Dokeos as a free software, and that we wouldn’t be working our asses off for a trademark that belonged to someone else, to be finally kicked out when it so appealed to the owner.

And so emerged two possibilities: keep doing the same and bend to the rules of someone with whom I didn’t share opinions (and I had already started bending for a while), or find another way to both continue doing what we were doing best, as well as kicking that trademark problem away. After many discussions, with many people involved both inside the Dokeos community and inside other professional communities, it appeared to me that, all in all, we had nothing to lose, and that our community of users and, more importantly, our own customers, would be better served by a split (actually, we were already doing 95% of the technical work, organizing yearly and monthly events much more successfully – in terms of attendance – than the ones organized by Dokeos, writing our own documentation, having our own localized support service, contributing to the Dokeos community much more than the Dokeos ever did, etc).

However, I was hesitant. Mostly because changing the name of a product you’ve worked so hard to promote is just like burning your house down right after you built it. But if this house had a fundamental flaw that made it unstable? We couldn’t live in there, neither could we invite our clients for lunch. Just too dangerous.

So, during the long months from September to December 2009, I gave an agreed period of three months (from a meeting on the 11th of September in Brussels) to the Dokeos company to propose a change in its structure. I reminded the expiry date to Dokeos a few days before it happened, but I was ignored, pretty much the same way so many of the users that ask Dokeos for quotes regularly are ignored because they don’t look professional enough… At this point (is was the 11th of December), I decided it was time to move on.

We stopped submitting code patches and new features to Dokeos that same day (so the current Dokeos was still one month back in terms of developments in comparison to the Chamilo version 1.8.6.2 when it was released in January 2010). I professionally announced my intentions and the ones of my company and finished the pending tasks we had been assigned, and officially stopped working for Dokeos on the 1st of January 2010.

The sad thing about Dokeos was that the project lost, in just a few months, all of its full-time developers, its lead developer (myself), all of its development community and most of its active forum contributors. The good thing is that they were now all gathered inside the Chamilo project. Dokeos was also now free to free itself from its community chains (which apparently is what it wanted).

What does this mean? This means that if you were a community member of Dokeos in the past (not only a customer), you will be better at home in the Chamilo community now (or at least from the end of January 2010, when the website will be [editor note: now “was”] much better equipped to host a series of interesting services). If you were a Dokeos customer… well you can hold to your hosting contract in Dokeos. Maybe you will be upgraded to a free Chamilo version within 6 months, or maybe there will be a new Dokeos version within that time, with half the features there are in Chamilo (but hey, some people say that less is better) and double the bugs… The only thing I can assure you is that if you were happy with my work in the past (which basically means the leadership of versions 1.6.5, 1.8.0, 1.8.2, 1.8.3, 1.8.4, 1.8.5, 1.8.6 and 1.8.6.1 of Dokeos – or all of them in the last 4 years), you will be happy to follow the Chamilo project.

To let you get a taste of what’s inside this new (minor) version, you can have a look at our demo portal: http://campus.chamilo.org

We have already received a lot of e-mails to support us in our initiative, and I thank you for that. Not having collected the authorizations to publish them in full with names, I’m just quoting a few:

“Hi Yannick, I think you’ve done well. Greetings and all my support to you in this new project” – from Italy

“… and as much as I was telling you this for the Dokeos project, I would like to contribute in the limits of my abilities to the Chamilo project” – from Spain

” Congratulations with this important step!  I think this will help this nice electronic learning environment much better.” – from The Netherlands

“… sounds exceptional to me…” – from Argentina

“Best of luck with this new branch-project!” – from Mexico

“I’m starting to collaborate with Chamilo and I’m happy for your enthusiasm in the the new enterprise. I hope I will be carried away by the enthusiasm.” – from Italy

It goes without saying that we didn’t use the Dokeos database to send this e-mail (that would have been an ethical mistake in my opinion). We rather contacted about 1000 contacts we made through events, blog posts, social networks, bug reports, etc.

Now let’s go to the practical topics…

What about Dokeos Pro and Dokeos Medical? Will they have equivalents in the Chamilo project?

The short answer is NO. Chamilo will be a free package. Additional extensions might be sold separately in case they require important investments that need to be covered, but the politics will be specific to Chamilo providers.

That question, though, has been worrying a lot of people since the creation of these “versions”. The truth is… it’s very easy to understand. In Chamilo, we want software to be free and accessible. If you want the videoconference or Oogie, you can get them from the sources of Dokeos. Any competent developer + sysadmin should be able to install it and get it running. Obvioulsy a lot of people have done so. You can find very cheap services on the internet of people that will do it for you. Furthermore, the Chamilo administration documentation will include clear installation instructions for all these, where the Dokeos installation documentation hid them to mark the difference between the free and the professional packages.

The software, however, is not everything in an e-learning project, and if I have to work for you, then I will charge you. On one side because I need to pay my bills, on another side because I couldn’t help everybody at the same time if I were helping for free. Easy enough to understand, I think.

Now the second point is that, as much as we’d like everything to be free, there are some things that nobody is actually willing to pay, like the development of a new tool that *we* think that will improve your e-learning experience, but that *you* don’t want to pay for (because you want to see it before you buy it). In this case, we’ll develop the extension and charge for it until the expenses are covered. This way, we allow people to get the exclusive use of a tool for a reasonable period of time (ahead of their challengers). This means that there *will be* professional versions of Chamilo, yes, but they will not be based on software options, but rather on a set of services (training, invitations to events, unlimited support, free course content and much more that we will soon detail on our website).

Whether these professional version of Chamilo will be endorsed by the association is something we still have to discuss, but we (BeezNest Latino aka Dokeos Latinoamérica) will definitely be at the cutting edge of e-learning technology, and will provide both new developments for the free version and productivity-improving packages that will first need to be covered financially to ensure more innovation comes faster in the future. This being said, most of our business will be generated from services, and we will not redirect development resources towards non-free products.

On a side note, the Chamilo Association, defending the open-source project and the safe use of the Chamilo project name, will be promoting contributions to the open-source software through the allocation of grants. These will be considered part of the financial cover for our possible non-free modules (i.e. you will not have to pay yourself to get high value solutions delivered to your door, as long as you support the association).

Will the videoconference and Oogie tools be free in Chamilo?

As explained a few weeks ago, they have always been. What isn’t free is the service to install them, but the code of both tools is GPL, and as such is public. I have personally contributed considerably to both, so in virtue of the General Public License, I am free to re-use it and re-distribute it. So as far as I’m concerned, the tools will be made available more obviously when time allows (the change of name is considerably time-costly, so you’ll have to be patient).

This being said, “Oogie” is a trademark, so we won’t be using that name either. Rather something like Chamilo-Office.

Why would you work so much for something that is free? Wouldn’t it be easier to just abandon and work for Microsoft?

Points of views are things that might change quickly over time, but personal beliefs tend to be more permanent. It is my belief that the open-source model works (sell the services, not the software), and it is my intention to be a personal proof of that. Now that doesn’t mean it’s easy money, and I’m certainly not doing it to become rich. I believe that by getting involved deeply in the open-source software development, I can help people and do my “social responsibility” move as well as develop a stable and comfortable professional career. Comfortable is not exactly the correct adjective for my current situation, as I’m working an awful lot of overtime to kick-start this project, but I think that getting through 2009 with a company of 12 and without a single budget-based lay-off shows just how strong we could be in a strong economic context. 75% of our work has been open-sourced in 2009. We hope we can maintain that rate through 2010. And yes… it would be easier (but more boring) to work for Microsoft, certainly.

Conclusion

Now is time to give you a nice and short conclusion:

• we were many unhappy amongst the Dokeos community
• 90% (at least) of the active contributing community agrees and is moving with us to the Chamilo project
• the Chamilo trademark is defended and shared by an association, as part of its goals, so the same split will not happen again
• we (my company and I) used to develop the Dokeos software for 65% in 2008 and 2009, and it reached 85% with other developers coming along with us
• if you were our customer, the service to you will only get better
• if you were part of the Dokeos community, you will feel a bit lonely staying there, most probably
• I will not work for the Dokeos company in the future, unless deep structural and philosophical changes are made

I hope to see you join the Chamilo community soon. The best you can do right now is register on our website: http://www.chamilo.org and let us know that you are willing to give us a hand, or just let us know you are supporting the initiative, morally (that’s good enough for us). You will receive notifications later this month on how to best contribute to the project and make it a success. If you are our customer, don’t contact us, we will contact you very soon with more details.

This blog will continue existing for the sake of continuity, but I will be slowly moving on to the more professional BeezNest’s blog soon: https://beeznest.wordpress.com as I should probably have done since the very beginning… :-)

2012-07 update

• The Chamilo project is now used in 180 countries around the world
• Our community reached 1,000,000 (self-registered) users this month (we do count reductions in numbers as well)
• We have customers with Chamilo campuses ranging from 200,000-employees to 50-customers
• We have been interviewed *many* times by radios, podcasts and magazines (printed and web)
• We are organizing around 10 events per year (both in-person and virtual) and participate to around 50 others per year, promoting Chamilo and how to use or contribute to the project
• Chamilo received 2 open-source awards in 2011 (Packt Publishing and Portal Programas)
• The Dokeos project closed its development repository to the public less than two months after we left and created Chamilo (in an attempt to prevent us from re-using fixes they would possibly develop – in the end we returned the system and they are now re-using most of our fixes and ideas, because we remained open to all). This also removed the possibility for us to “compare” our development speed with them through tools like Ohloh’s.
• Chamilo now has local national (and official) groups in Belgium, Spain and Peru (and is currently preparing one in France and one in Venezuela)
• Chamilo now integrates key usability features for the teachers directly from the browser: recording your voice, generating voice from text, drawing, photo retouching, drag & drop of documents, etc.

In terms of what our first goals were in 2010, we certainly reached them. The business around Chamilo took time to launch though, but we have now reached a step where our customers come pretty much on their own. The future is bright.

Style broken when installing Dokkeos on one local computer then seeing it from another

A frequent question I’ve been asked is why, when installing Dokeos on a local computer, then trying to see it from another computer, the styles are broken (the homepage appears as a list of links from top to bottom).

This is all a question of Name Resolution (or DNS).

How you did it

The initial problem lies on how you did the installation on your local computer: you downloaded Dokeos, then took the easy way and installed it on “http://localhost/dokeos/”, or “http://127.0.0.1”, or even your local IP “http://192.168.0.15” for example. Didn’t you?

Well, Dokeos remembers that, and asks you, during the installation process, what URL you want to access your portal with. You remember that?

Why this is a problem

As Dokeos remembered it, it will now serve the future pages as if they were starting with http://localhost, or whatever name you gave it during the first install. You can check that, from the other computer, by pressing CTRL-U in your navigator. You will see links like this for the query to the stylesheet (CSS): http://localhost/dokeos/main/css/dokeos_blue/default.css. Well, guess what… “localhost” for the secondary computer is not equal to “localhost” for the main computer. In fact, “localhost” on the secondary computer is pretty much itself, so he’s trying to look like this: http://myself/dokeos/main/css…

This means that the secondary computer is expecting Dokeos to be installed locally as well, which, in general, is not the case. If it was the case, you would probably get even more problems in the current situation anyway.

How you should do it

The *best* solution is to give the first computer (the server) a public name. This public name can be a public subdomain name (like courses.yourinstitution.com for example), but this implies an access to defining such a name. This name will be permanent and equal for all, so everybody will know where the computer is and you will define this subdomain name at the moment you install Dokeos, then use it with all the other computers. If you don’t have a permanent internet connexion, however, and you use an external domain name server (the one from your internet service provider for example), this configuration will not work.

The second best solution is to have a local name server and define a name for the Dokeos server on that local domain name server. This works like above except you don’t need an internet connexion for that to work. Sometimes, the router can act like a name server (see your router’s documentation).

The third solution (which is not one of the best one, but still works in a closed environment) is to make sure the server has a fixed, permanent IP address, and define a unique name for the Dokeos server (like say: “www.dokeos.local”) then define this name on every computer (including the server).

Under Linux, this is done by defining a line with the fixed IP address of the Dokeos server, a space, and the given local domain name (www.dokeos.local for example) in the /etc/hosts file (you need root permissions to edit this file).

Under Windows, the same file exists with the same format, but you have to look a bit deeper to find it: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

Don’t hesitate to report if you found a better solution.