1.9.8, "Thon"

Chamilo 1.9.8 is a minor stable version with a series of improvements on top of 1.9.6.
This version is the first Chamilo version to drop support for Internet Explorer 7. We insist that you recommend your users to use modern browsers that respect web standards. If they cannot avoid Internet Explorer, make sure they use at least version 10, which respects a little bit more than half of the W3C standards (but still much less than Firefox, Chrome, Opera or even Safari)

Release name

Thon is a small city in the Belgian region of Wallonia, several times classified as the most beautiful village of the South region of Belgium. It is a quite, beautiful place without anything out of the ordinary but made of beautiful, hundred years old homes built from famous Wallonia blue stone and crossed by the Samson river. Its stability and it's position just next to the large cliffs surrounding the Meuse are symbolically close to Chamilo 1.9.8, highly stable but a few steps away for the huge jump to the next major version.

Security

All security issues are published and patches are attached on our security issues page. If you think you found an additional security issue you'd like to report, please check our procedure there.

• Patches have been applied to one of the packages of FCKEditor used for image uploads in Chamilo 1.9.6.1. These patches are included in 1.9.8 (see issues 11 and 12)
• Some other possible XSS attack vectors through initially privileged access have been fixed (see issue #13)

New Features

• Plugins: added possibility to add menu tab entry for any plugin
• Added a way to hide course teacher, if there are too many
• Added OpenMeetings plugin for videoconference through Chamilo
• Allow student to check his/her test results if the date of the test is over
• Added option to prevent "login as" feature on enhanced-security portals
• Register "user disabling" action in important activities
• Make check_version() AJAX-based
• Added CAPTCHA on registration page (requires manual configuration edition)
• Added "Sessions subscribed to" icon in users list
• Exercises: Added auto-evaluation mode with feedback but without correct answer hint
• Course copy: Included work/assignments copy in course copy
• Tickets: new support tickets system integrated as a plugin (requires activation by admin)
• Groups: Added possibility to increase the number of users in a group above the category limit
• Added X-SendFile support to boost files download (requires manual configuration edition and web server modules)
• Added individual mode for users assignments to HR director
• Added list of students in course export
• Exercises: Added possibility to clear all results before a specific date
• Plugins: Added support for sessions in BigBlueButton plugin (requires re-installation or manual DB update)
• Exercises: Added auditing of "clean results" action by teachers
• Added support for "for" attributes in fields for WCAG/WAI AA compatibility
• Added user profile fields of type "File upload"
• Add Aiken (Word) import format in exercises
• Add browser language auto-detection at first connection
• Added BuyCourses plugin for PayPal payments

Improvements (minor features)

Please check the documentation/changelog.html for more details.

Debugging

Please check the documentation/changelog.html for more details on about 300 bugfixes

Stylesheets and theming

Stylesheets have been considerably changed in version 1.9.8, which might require a little update on your side if you have a custom stylesheet. We're sorry about it, but it was really necessary to improve the adaptability of the interface for mobile devices (which we are sure you will appreciate). If you only changed the logo, we recommend you make a copy of an existing Chamilo style (main/css/chamilo*) again, rename it and simply replace the logo then upload the new style. If you have more complex styles, you might want to ask for the assistance of your web designer at the moment you update Chamilo to this version.

• Updated logo to new Chamilo logo in config section
• Dropped support for IE7
• Improve styling for profile-attached files
• Great update to learning paths visualization
• Changed help image in learning paths
• Updated chat screen appearance
• (d64b865) Add "section-login" class in login pages

Web services

• Improved sessions list in sessions_list.soap.php and added GetLearnpathHighestLessonLocation() (also BT#6667)
• Updated WSCreateUser() to manage active status, added WSGetUser(), WSGetUserFromUsername() and WSSubscribeUserToSessionSimple() and fixed WSListSessions() to allow sessions sales from Ubercart Drupal module
• (43949c7) Add check on existence of extra fields (optional)
• Added WSUserSubscribedInCourse()
• (5ddc3c0) Assume student status in EditUser* services and prevent modifying an admin to student

Removals

• Custom tabs can no longer be defined directly in the settings_current table. If you have custom_tabs in this table (select * from settings_current where variable='show_tabs' AND subkey like 'custom_tab_%'), please add them through the homepage edition screen.
• Remove custom_tab_* feature

1.9.6.1

Security fixes were added see:

https://support.chamilo.org/projects/chamilo-18/wiki/Security_issues

1.9.6, "Rochefort"

Chamilo 1.9.6 is a minor stable version with security patches and a series of improvements on top of 1.9.4.

1.9.4, "Puebla"

Chamilo 1.9.4 is a minor stable version with a series of improvements on top of 1.9.2.

1.9.2, "Hanga Roa"

Chamilo 1.9.2 is a minor stable version with a series of improvements on top of 1.9.0.

1.9.0, "Vogüé"

Chamilo 1.9.0 is a major stable version with loads of added features.

Release name

Vogüé is a small town in the French region of Rhône-Alpes, and one of the most beautiful villages of France. It features a 12th century, a generally very pretty landscape and is one of the few remote towns in current growth. One of our new development team members chose this familiar town because it inspires stability and diversity.

New Features

This version of Chamilo includes a few new features.

• Most Chamilo pages are now HTML5-compliant (#4400)
• Chamilo now implements an adaptative design which greatly improves its use on mobile devices (#4400)
• Plugins: The plugin system has been reworked a lot and new plugins were added Static, Facebook/Twitter share buttons, Videoconference (with BBB), etc (#4450, #4557). Now you can select where the plugins will be show, we call these Regions. New Hello World, Social tools and Show regions plugins added
• Admin: Feature for admin to recover deleted attendances (BT#3002)
• Documents: Record your voice (flash mode)
• Global: Platform-wide, FB-type chat with social network friends (#3565, #5264)
• Exercises: Added questions categories management in exercises (#294 & #3974)
• Admin: E-mail alerts can be configured and sent to specific users (#984, #4358, #4658)
• System: Migration to one single, simple normal form database (#1245, #3910, #4728, #4791) (heavy migration process but should result in lighter database processing, migration heavily tried by many testers)
• Global: New CSS framework added
• Global: Implementation of Twig Template System
• Global: A feature sniffer now can check if the user's browser has enough resources to use all features of Chamilo (#1337)
• Tracking: Teachers can now see their own results if they are subscribed to a course (#1409)
• Social: you can now choose when to receive e-mails from the social network notifications (this requires a working Cron setup)(#2189)
• Exercises: It is now possible to answer a question and "Mark it" for later review, then review all marked questions (#2486, #3958 & #4031)
• Agenda: You can now connect your calendar to your Google Calendar (#3040)
• Agenda: You can now see a specific event's details from inside the calendar view (#3143)
• Languages: Added structure for Turkish and Basque languages (#3350)
• Exercises: Audio recording question: students can now record their answers as audio directly from the browser or uploading an MP3 (#3478)
• Exercises: any question can now be "cloned" (#3551)
• Admin: It is now possible to search for platform settings, through a neat search box (#3655)
• Exercises: A button now allows you to save each question when going through the test, even in all questions on one page mode (#3683)
• Admin: Added default visibility settings for new courses (#3684)
• Admin: Added possibility to disable the documents quick list on courses list page (#3766 & #3904)
• Wiki: A search feature now lets you search in all wiki pages (#3849)
• Glossary: It is now possible to import glossary terms through CSV files (#3857)
• Course progress: It is now possible to import course progress (#3858)
• Exercises: There is now a report by question for exercises, in order to know which questions are too difficult or too simple for most students (#3864 & #3954)
• Wiki: The wiki now includes contributions statistics (#3870)
• Admin: A new administration top bar has been added, Wordpress-style, which should allow administrators to manage Chamilo much faster (#3899, #4162, #4843)
• Exercises: Added "all questions" selector for random number of questions to avoid having to re-edit each time (#3942)
• Learning paths: Students can now add new forum threads if forum included in learning path (#3944)
• Assignments: It is now possible to fulfill an assignment directly as an HTML document from the assignment tool (#3978)
• Plugins: The BigBlueButton plugin has been adjusted to work with BigBlueButton 0.80 and manage *
  webconference recordings from inside the course (#3988)
• Exercises: You can now add a congratulations text at the end of an exercise (#4074)
• Exercises: You can now watch the progress of your students, live, while they are taking an exam (#4100)
• Global: Added the possibility to vote for courses, and a "Popular courses" block on the homepage (#4191, #4200)
• Plugins: Added Shibboleth authentication plugin (#4554)
• Plugins: Added RSS feed plugin for course events (#4574)
• Plugins: Added statis HTML block plugin (#4575)
• Documents: Added WAMI Audio recorder in Flash to the documents tool (requires admin settings to be configured) (#4596)
• Plugins: Added a course search plugin to find a specific course by title (#4597)
• Plugins: "Share this" plugin (#4598)
• Admin: Added custom logged-out pages mechanism (#4610)
• Admin: Zombies! Now possible to disable old users (#4652)
• System: Added CDN static files controller for high-availability servers (#4653)
• Assignments: The teacher can now download all files from a specific assignment in one Zip (#4687)
• Documents: Added Flash(TM) webcam photoboot, whereby teachers (or students through groups) can take pictures from their webcam, wich get uploaded to the documents tool directly (#4856) (enable through admin settings)
• Plugins: Added plugin for School Server of OLPC Perú project (Squid proxy filtering from course) (#4925)
• Exercises: Added new type of questions that automate the repartition of score between available answers (#5012)
• Exercises: Time counter now changes color at 3, then 1 minute to increase awareness of student, and appears nicely in all-questions-on-one-page exercises (#5043, #5267)
• System: The stats collection of Chamilo.org is now automatic. If you want to disable this feature, edit admin/index.php and look for fsockopen() (#5104)
• Global: Improvements for iPad(TM) and iPhone(TM) by disabling auto-capitalization (#5116)
• Documents: Added thumbnails to the advanced files manager in the documents tool (#5142)
• Tracking: Added a personal timeline for students in their My reporting tab (#5163)
• Admin: Added notification to admins when a new user is requesting approval for account activation (#5178)
• Documents: Added Flash(TM) reader for Freemind's mindmap format

Improvements

See documentation/changelog.html for more details

Debugging

See documentation/changelog.html for more details

Style changes

Due to the move to HTML5, it is very likely that any older stylesheet will have to be updated when upgrading to Chamilo 1.9.

• Styles changed for all forms
• New top bar added (only for admins)
• Responsive layout for Mobile Devices

Security

• If you haven't updated to 1.8.8.6 previously, then you will benefit from 1.8.8.6's security patches by installing 1.9.

Known issues

• Document title: The option to NOT use a document title different than the filename in the documents tool has been removed. This means that if this setting was not set to the default option in your Chamilo option or if you have a very old installation that you have been upgrading over the years, you might experience problems accessing the documents. In this case, we recommend contacting an official provider of Chamilo to take this migration in charge.
• During upgrade, if your database ends with "c_", the installation process will report errors in the PHP error log. This is due to a check on the new c_id field for database normalization, but is not important. The corresponding logging code can be disabled in database.lib.php
• Agenda regression: because we implemented a much more usable and familiar agenda for most of you, and because we lacked some time to go into the details, we have temporarily removed the possibility to make an event visible to specific users (they are always visible to all the course users right now) - see task #5201 for details
• Exercises: When reviewing an exercise, hotspot questions results are not remembered see #3980
• Learning paths: Copying a learning path with embedded documents and exercises from one course to another might cause resource linking problems (images, audio, etc). We recommend copying the complete course and then removing unnecessary elements, or exporting the learning path as SCORM.

Third-Party Libraries additions/updates

• Fullcalendar js library version 1.5.2
• Twig Template system added
• Twitter Bootstrap CSS Framework
• More libraries were added but haven't been properly registered at this time...

Removals

• Removed deprecated "search" plugin (used to work with MnoGoSearch but hasn't been used for years to our knowledge - was successfully replaced by Xapian)
• Removed the RED5 installation guide from the documentation directory: the supported BigBlueButton videoconference system provides its own installation manual, linked from the Chamilo admin guide.
• Removed the "Use document title" option - now we force users to use a document title - this avoids many issues with documents names - see #3781

1.8.8.6, "Rottweil"

Chamilo 1.8.8.6 is a minor security fix, stable version for version 1.8.8.4. If you are using Chamilo 1.8.8.4, we highly recommend you upgrade to this version, either by following the usual upgrade procedure, or by applying a very small patch, as explained on our security issues listing page. The security fixes are all considered "moderate". This means you could loose data (specifically dropbox tool data in this case) and your users might get tricked into providing credentials to potential hackers, but the integrity of your server will not be in direct danger. 1.8.8.6 was developed in a separate branch, but fixes were applied to the 1.9 branch, which means 1.9 can be considered as the follower of 1.8.8.6 as much as of 1.8.8.4. If you have 1.8.8.4, migrating to 1.9 will effectively remove the need for migrating to the intermediary step of 1.8.8.6

Why Rottweil?

Rottweil is a small medieval German town where the occasional tourist might feel very relaxed and secure. This feeling is increased by the obviously-difficult-to-attack strategical position. Considering the security-only aspect of this release, we wanted a small city name that would represent this more secure aspect. Rottweil has been visited by one of our team members in the past... that's all it takes.

1.8.8.4, "La Molina"

Chamilo 1.8.8.4 is a minor corrective stable version for version 1.8.8.2 with a bunch of new minor features added.

1.8.8.2, "Bellavista"

Chamilo 1.8.8.2 is a minor corrective stable version for version 1.8.8 to enable easier install on shared hosting.

1.8.8, "Miraflores"

Chamilo 1.8.8 is a major stable version. Although it doesn't come with a strong redesign, it provides a large number of small improvements to the teacher's toolset and the user's using pleasure. Audio recording, schema drawing, certification generating, better administration features, plugin for videoconference with BigBlueButton and e-commerce with PrestaShop are only a few of the improvements that you will find in this version.