Yesterday, the Chamilo project celebrated its 2 month of existence. Time has been flying by, but this opportunity is excellent for a little recap...
First of all, let's talk about numbers. In two months time, we've already been able to sum up 1400 users registered on the website, 3800 users tried out campus.chamilo.org and created more than 1000 courses. We frequently reach 50 simultaneous connected users, which makes the social network much more interesting (although still sub-used in comparison to what it could be).
Second, about development. 1.8.7 is well on its way for an alpha release next week. 2.0 is still in development and unstable, but we all hope we'll see a first release at the end of June, ready for summer holiday in the North hemisphere. Both are full of nice and shiny features that will soon be available in Alpha trials. One of the most appealing points is a customizable dashboard where several user roles can see the progress of their employees/students through the courses in a quick eye scroll. Much more efficient to spot the potential learning problems than the previous system used to be.
Third, we implemented the first ever continuous integration server for Chamilo 1.8, which puts us right on track for a more-stable-than-ever release. Try it out at testing.beeznest.com (click Chamilo and Graphs to see more explicit information).
Fourth, the 2.0 team initiated the "Friday debug sessions", which lets people join our IRC channel (see left column icon "IRC" to join) and have a session where the development team explains how to use the system (on demo2.chamilo.org) and ask people to check it for bugs or weird behaviours, then register a bug report if the bug is confirmed, on support.chamilo.org. These sessions start at noon in UTC time, 1pm for Western Europe. Today, we were about 20 users trying out the system.
Fifth, we have now entered the official search for the biggest Chamilo event this year (so far): Chamilo Users Days America, which will happen in Lima, Peru, on July 9th and 10th. We are planning for a minimum of 400 visitors, with plenty of goodies. So if you want to join but do not speak Spanish, don't hesitate to make your voice heard before we close the program, so we can include a few speaches in English for you. You can let us know on the corresponding forum or send us an e-mail at info at chamilo dot org.
Last but not least, we have been in active discussions with companies and institutions on how to join the association either as a member or an official provider. We're now just waiting for a few administrative locks to click open in order to get our first 5 official providers register. This means several businesses will work together to help improve the system within one or two months, which means more improvements to Chamilo, faster, which means you will continue receiving improvements much faster than you used to be if you came from another community, and we are very happy about that!
We support Chamilo, do you?