As Moodle gains in maturity, its directions are increasingly influenced by the community of developers and users. A dynamic database of proposed features and their status can be found at moodle.org/bugs. Your contributions in the form of ideas, code, feedback and promotion are all very welcome - see the Developers manual for more details. You can also pay to have certain features developed sooner- see moodle.com/development for information and a quote.
Here is our current vision of the future, though this is always subject to change depending on sponsors and developers.
Version 1.4 - August 31st
This release contains a lot of structural improvements and refactoring in key modules. It also includes many interface improvements. Some highlights include:
- New Enrolments architecture allows all manner of new automated enrolment processes. Included are a Paypal system (for paid courses) with instant access, arbitrary external database usage, parsing of flatfiles dumped from legay systems and so on.
- Improved Resource handling with a new one step process and better control over display format. New resource types can be developed as plugins.
- Refactored Quiz module allows new question types as plugins. A new question type called Calculated Questions allows questions to be presented uniquely to each student.
- Chat module now supports an optional chat daemon as a backend, providing near-instant response to hundreds of users.
- Improved Glossary module makes it easier to develop new glossary formats.
- Improved Backup handles the translation of user content (such as links) better than ever.
- Improved SCORM module handling an ever-wider range of SCORM content.
- Improved interfaces for adding students, course creators and administrators.
Version 1.5 - Later in 2004
This release will focus mainly on the display layer and making Moodle fully compliant with important web accessibility standards such as WAI (W3C), SENDA (UK) and Section 508 (US).
- Completely rewritten display layer that completely separates presentation from application logic
- Templating system with templates conforming to XHTML 1.0 for accessibility
- Powerful system of Cascading Style Sheets designed for cross-platform compatibility.
As with most Moodle releases there will also be an array of new community-developed features and modules.
Version 2.0
This major release will contain some exciting developments in making Moodle more network-aware, with a natural evolution of Moodle's focus on collaboration. More on this here later.
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