Platform Settings

Chamilo has an extensive configuration system with settings organized into categories. The full set of categories below mirrors the Configuration settings page in the admin panel — and the underlying SettingsCurrentFixtures.php in the source code, which is the source of truth for variable names, titles, and descriptions.

Access platform settings from the administration panel by clicking Configuration settings.

The platform settings page showing configuration categories organized by functional area

All categories

There are 39 configuration categories in total, listed alphabetically below. The number after each link is the count of settings in that category.

Platform-wide

• Administrator Identity (12) — Identity and contact details of the platform administrator.

• Platform (29) — Platform-level identity, time zone, registration policy, online users, performance flags.

• Display (24) — Homepage layout, gravatar, menus, branding behaviour.

• Editor (26) — Rich-text editor (TinyMCE) toolbars, plugins, AI helpers.

• Languages (12) — Available languages, default language, fallbacks.

• Mail (18) — Outgoing-mail layout, sender identity, signature.

• Workflows (23) — Cross-cutting workflow toggles (course creation, enrollment validation…).

Authentication, security & privacy

• Security (31) — Login protection, password policy, headers, 2FA, IDS.

• Registration (20) — Self-registration policy and post-registration redirects.

• Privacy (6) — Consent, data export, account-deletion requests.

• CAS (7) — Legacy CAS configuration carried over from 1.x.

Course and session lifecycle

• Course (45) — Defaults and policies that apply to courses platform-wide.

• Sessions (68) — Session lifecycle, coach access windows, visibility.

• Course Catalog (13) — Behaviour of the public course catalog.

• Profile (29) — Which fields appear on the user profile.

Course tools

• Agenda (11)

• Announcements (9)

• Assignments (Work) (12)

• Attendance (4)

• Chat (5)

• Documents (29)

• Dropbox (8)

• Exercises (Tests) (63)

• Forums (9)

• Glossary (3)

• Groups (3)

• Learning Paths (51)

• Surveys (12)

Assessment & recognition

• Gradebook (Assessments) (34) — Score display, decimals, certificate thresholds.

• Certificates (9) — Defaults applied when a learner earns a certificate.

• Skills (13) — Skills tree, awarding rules, profile integration.

• Tracking (10) — What is recorded, what reports are exposed.

Communication & community

• Messaging (7)

• Social Network (7)

AI

• AI Helpers (13) — Providers per task type (text, image, video, tutor, grading).

Operations & integration

• Cron Jobs (3)

• Search (3) — Xapian full-text search configuration.

• Tickets (7) — Helpdesk system.

• Web Services (7) — Legacy SOAP/REST endpoints.

Cross-cutting topics

These pages don't map to a single category — they collect settings from several categories around a topic.

• Module Settings — Enable/disable platform modules and features at a higher level.

• Performance Tuning — Caching and load-related settings.

How Settings Work

• Settings are stored in the database (settings table) and managed through the web interface

• Some settings are URL-locked in multi-URL setups (their value applies platform-wide and cannot be overridden per URL - see access_url_locked and access_url_changeable columns in the settings table); others (most) can be overridden per access URL

• Changes take effect immediately (no server restart required), although your user session might be keeping some of them in memory. If changes don't reflect immediately, logout and login to flush your session.

• Some settings have dependencies — changing one may affect the behaviour of others

• Variable names shown on each page (e.g. 2fa_enable) match the row in the settings database table and the keys used in overrides (config/settings_overrides.yaml) where applicable.

For more information, check Configurations on our wiki.

Tips

• Document your settings — Keep a record of non-default settings and why you changed them

• Change one thing at a time — When troubleshooting, modify one setting at a time so you can identify the effect

• Test in a staging environment — For significant setting changes, test on a staging server first