www.chamilo.org

On July 7, 2010 the Chamilo 2.0 development team met in Ghent (Belgium) to discuss the current status of the project and the plans we have for the future, as well as the pending release of Chamilo 2.0 itself.

First of all there are some important dates we would like to share with you, so you all have something to look forward too:

• August 18 & 19: "Chamilo 2.0 Sprint" focusing on coding, documentation, testing and translations. The sprint will be organized in Ghent.
• October 18: Release of the second Chamilo 2.0 Beta
• November 22: Release of the first Chamilo 2.0 Release Candidate

After the first release candidate (or "golden master" for the Apple afficionados) things might go pretty fast as it has the potential to be the final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. So stay tuned for these releases / packages, because we'll need your help to make sure everything is tested as well as possible.

Selected highlights from the progress report:

• The Chamilo Package Manager already allowed us to install seperate so called packages or modules. However, considering the modular nature of the platform, update functionality is an absolute necessity. One might very well have version 1.0 of the repository installed, version 1.5 of the courses application, etc. ... and you should be able to update each and every one of them seperately. That is, as long as their dependencies are not conflicting. On top of all that the installation of our content objects was completely seperated from the repository installation. This now allows you to do "extra" things for your content object, one of them being the automatic installation of example objects into a user's repository.
• During the previous Chamilo 2.0 Code Sprint the architecture of the course tools was completely rewritten to allow for more flexibility and at the same time generalizing base functionality across all tools. One of the main advantages right now is the possibility to list course publications in several different ways. Previously most tools were limited to a specific view, e.g. a list for announcements, a table for assessments, etc. Implementing extra views implied adding a lot of extra code even though the idea was the same everywhere. To facilitate this process the so called renderer has been abstracted to provide several views by default: table, list, gallery table and slideshow. Enabling them for a specific tool is just a matter of listing them in that tool's allowed views array.
• A lot of work was done on a multitude of applications: surveys, portfolio, internship organizer, iCal parser, gradebook, peer assessment, reporting, a Wikipedia-like view for our wikis and finally a lot of general layout enhancements
• Nowadays a lot of content is hosted externally using services like YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs, etc. On top of that several open standards exist to connect to an extensive array of external repositories. The project desperately needed a generic way to connect with these external services. (external from a platform point-of-view) Several steps were already taken in the past to make this possible. The team of the university of Geneva implemented a connection with the Swiss educational Fedora repository and over at Erasmus we implemented a YouTube / streaming media manager to connect to several streaming servers. Now that these features have been merged and the architecture has been sufficiently abstracted we can, at least in theory, support an unlimited number of services directly from our Chamilo 2.0 repository. Currently supported are: YouTube, MediaMosa (developed by the VUB team), Flickr and Google Docs ... and plenty more connectors are on their way. Stay tuned for a follow-up post expanding on this subject.
• The team at Hogeschool Gent completely refactored the migration application. An essential component as people are somewhat unlikely to start from scratch when migrating to Chamilo 2.0. The new architecture is lightweight, easier to use and implement (for those of you who want to write an extension to migrate from other, unnamed, LMSes to Chamilo 2.0).

Selected highlights from the To Do list:

• Even more migration extensions and external repository managers
• Extensive implementation of the Chamilo 2.0 rights management
• Several applications are under development: student tracking system, campus plugin, assessment, competences, gradebook
• Checking DBMS-support (including but not limited to PostgreSQL)
• A quick starter's guide for developers being written by the team from Hogeschool Gent
• A complete reference manual for developers being written by the Erasmus team

For a complete overview, check the following documents:

• Progress report, listing what has been done since the previous developers meeting
• "On the horizon" (To Do list), listing what still needs to be done
• Technical documentation to accompany the progress report and documenting several new features and/or major changes