Moodle Docs: Release notes

Release notes

Coming in Moodle 1.1 Beta 1 (13th August, 2003) :

This list is in progress and still to be finalised: Activities can move any distance with two clicks

Topics/weeks can now be moved up and down

Pop-up menu to switch between topics/weeks

New chat module for synchronous discussions

Two quiz question types: Numerical and Description

Expanded quiz reporting

Languages can now have a parent language

Improved course browser (handles large numbers of courses) (tbd)

Courses can be hidden from students (tbd)

Web links can be in pop-up windows (tbd)

Consistent grading scheme throughout all modules (tbd)

Better control over peer-grading in forums (tbd)

Ability to add text between activities in course display (tbd)

Ability to indent activities in course display (tbd)

Improved program resources, allowing more variables and control (tbd)

Other miscellaneous improvements and fixes

New in Moodle 1.0.9 (29th May, 2003) :

General: Various optimisations and significant performance enhancements

Several obscure security fixes

Moodle is now well-behaved when enclosed within a frame

Richtext editor can now be used in more text-editing fields

New format "Plain text format", useful when posting code or HTML.

New format "Wiki format", allows Wiki-style tagging in most places

New popup allows emoticons/smilies to be inserted by clicking on images

Ability to specify permissions of new folders and files created on the server

Some fixes for servers running in Safe Mode (some file problems remain)

Various fixes for cleaning some external text of quotes, etc

Various fixes for PostgreSQL 7.3 compatibility

Started migration of HTML code towards XHTML Transitional

Countless other little fixes all over the place
Languages: 10 new language packs! Argentinian Spanish, Czech, Portuguese, Slovakian, Romanian, Danish, Russian, Polish, Chinese Traditional and French Canadian.

Fixes and upgrades to almost all language packs

Language can be specified for the current session (see menu on home page and login page) and can be changed on any page by something to the url, eg: http://moodle.org/?lang=ru

Language menu can be restricted to a subset of languages and even removed.
Truetype fonts are now part of the language packs

ALL dates/times can now be reformatted as part of the language pack

A small but annoying bug was fixed with the web-based language editor on Windows servers that caused language files to grow
Developers: Global debug variable gives more feedback about uninitialised variables and the like

Various fixes to tidy up and further standardise some of the PHP code

Various fixes for robustness (ensuring variables are always initialised)
Admin: Some changed options and code in config-dist.php (if upgrading, compare with your current config.php or rebuild your config.php from scratch)

Many changes to themes - authors of custom themes should read theme/UPGRADE.txt

New moodle.org registration function for security notifications etc

Admin directory can be moved from /admin to something else (see config-dist.php)

User listing is now paged, and can now be searched for strings

Module management: activity modules can now be individually disabled or deleted completely

Improvements to the language editing page

Better checking of PHP environment during installation, with warnings

Cleaner installation procedure.
User management: New role: Course creator - just like teacher but can also create new courses

New authentication plug-in named "manual", prevents users from creating their own accounts

"Forgot Password" routine now uses an email confirmation before resetting password
Courses: Activities on the course page now have a little button to hide/show that activity to students

Whole topics/weeks can also now be hidden or shown

The list of participants now has some paging, to cope with very large classes

Zip/Unzip is now supported by an internal zip library, removing the dependence on external programs to do this. This also means that zip/unzip now works on Windows.
Assignments: Assignment submissions can be sorted

Assignment notification mail isn't sent to unenrolled students
Forums: Display of forum discussions list is greatly improved

Whole discussions can be moved to any other forum with a single click

Date/time of posts is now "last modified", not "created"

Blank subject-lines or messages are now prevented

More intelligent parsing and display of text in posts

Force Subscribe now works on the "Site News" forum (mails all active students/teachers)

Better handling of mailouts to prevent the possibility of double copies that sometimes happened with very large classes
Workshop Assignment module (not included: available soon as a separate download): A very interesting new module contributed by Ray Kingdon,

A flexible tool that implements a variety of peer-grading and example-setting schemes that involve a whole group in examining and grading pieces of work.
Quizzes: New question type, Random Question (selects from all questions in the same category)

New question type, Matching Question (student must match answers to questions)

New question type, Random Matching Short-Answers (randomly creates Matching Questions from the available Short Answer questions in the same category)

Quiz question import from text files (modular design allows expansion to new formats - a beta Blackboard module is included)

'Create multiple questions' wizard to quickly create a random quiz

Quiz questions may be randomly shuffled

Quiz answers (multiple choice, etc) may be randomly shuffled

Fixed off-by-one error when "Save Grades" button wasn't used.

Regrading works properly if the quiz has been changed

Editing a question after it's already been used in a quiz no longer affects quiz results

Multiple choice answers are labelled a,b,c not 1,2,3
Resources: Better performance when editing large text or HTML resources

Plain images are now display centered within a proper web page (not raw).

Wiki format added as a new option for Resource pages
Custom Themes: A number of new styles have been added to all built-in themes. Some of these are ESSENTIAL to viewing some of the new features. PLEASE SEE theme/UPGRADE.txt TO SEE THE CHANGES YOU WILL HAVE TO MAKE TO OLDER THEMES.

Custom themes now have the capability to re-define all the little button graphics. There is a new entry in theme/x/config.php ($THEME->custompix) and a new optional subdirectory "pix". See the theme cordoroyblue for an example.

New in Moodle 1.0.8.1 (12th January, 2003) :

No new features, just bug fixes:: Fixed one-in-a-million bug with email confirmations
Quiz feedback text can be styled
Deals better with a new module that is not readable
Fixed bug when setting times for assignments, quizzes when the teacher is in a different timezone to the server
Fixed listing of calendar months on some servers
Richtext editor now works properly in choice module
More robust when looking for some environment variables
Installer checks that sessions directory is writeable
Added a small test program to test sessions support

New in Moodle 1.0.8 (6th January, 2003) :

Databases: Moodle now has complete native support support for PostgreSQL 7 databases (thanks to Mary Hunter for the SQL files and other ideas!). Moodle also now supports table prefixes, which means you can install Moodle into any database, even if it already contains tables from other web applications. A number of other changes have also been made to the code structure that will make it fairly easy now to add full support for other database types.
Languages: Six new languages have been added! Chinese (from Zhang Dexuan), Arabic (from Ahmed Nabil), Turkish (from M. Cüneyt Birkök), Swedish (from Set Lonnert), Thai (from Wim Singhanart) and Dutch (from Hans Zwart and Jacob Romeyn). Many thanks to all these hard-working people! Most other languages have also had updates and fixes since 1.0.7. The language editor has been improved slightly, making it easier to see new strings and empty strings that need translating. The main documentation manual is also now able to be localised and will appear in the current language if translated versions exist.
Layout: A number of small improvements have been made in the layout of many pages (such as the forum posting screen) to make them clearer, neater and smaller. Almost all text entry screens now have specific help items alongside them (depending on the pedagogical focus). The forums now have a quick search form available on every page.
Themes: Theme support of CSS has been extended to give theme makers more control over more of the Moodle web site. A variety of new themes has been added to the distribution.
Resources: A new type of resource has been added, called "Program", which allows Moodle to cooperate with external web applications by passing information about the current user and session to them. Uploaded HTML files can now be edited using the WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Choices: Results can now be "published" (either with names or anonymously) so that everyone can see the statistics. Choice text can be edited using HTML editor.
Grades: Students can now see all their own grades for a course on one page, accessible from the course home page.
Quizzes: Students can now review all their past quiz attempts, but only if the quiz has been closed, and if the teacher allows it.
Authorisation: The database module now supports databases that contain md5-encrypted passwords, which means it should now be compatible with systems like PostNuke. When using external authorisation students are now forced to fully fill-out their information before they can enter any course. An ADOdb bug was also causing some mischief when the external database type was the same as the Moodle database. Overall it's now quite usable.
Administration: The admin can now assign other people to also be admins. The interface to the Database Manager has been cleaned up, and it now always uses the same language as the current Moodle language (see separate download for moodle-1.0.8-mysql-admin.zip).
Debugging mode: Admins/developers can use a "debugging mode" which prints more information and warning messages about unset variables and so on - making it easier to find bugs. To make this work a LOT of cleaning up has been done on existing Moodle code to make it more robust.
Other things: Unpacked template module is ignored by Moodle.
A default country can be set by the admin
View source button in Richtext editor was missing with some languages
A bug affecting grades page on some installations was fixed.
File upload problems on 4.3.0 have been fixed.
Some minor problems with the display of logs has been fixed.
Improved GD detection that works with PHP 4.3.0
If GD is not present then Moodle is now more usable (just less capable)
A bug causing the wrong display of the date has been fixed.
Usernames can now contain "." and "-" characters.
Cookies now use table prefixes for unique naming, so that many different moodle sites can be run on the same web site and database.
Site news forum heading can now be changed (edit the forum).
Improved code for gathering form input
The buggy_referrer variable is fixed and now works as expected
Some small performance improvements here and there
Other improvements I probably forgot to add here
Many little code clean-ups.

New in Moodle 1.0.7 (10th December, 2002):

Simpler version numbers!: The four-digit version numbers were getting a bit ridiculous (too complex), so I've switched back to simpler 3-digit numbers. The first digit is the major structural version, the second digit is for decent-sized upgrades and the third digit is for minor upgrades.
Languages: Two completely new languages have been added: Indonesian (from Arfan Hidayat) and Japanese (from Mitsuhiro Yoshida). A US English version was added too. Most other languages contain some updates. All languages now contain locale information, which means that when a user changes the language all the dates will display properly too.
Database access: ADOdb was upgraded to 2.50 which should fix some problems with very new versions of PHP (4.3.0).
Layout improvements: Cleaned up the display of "side boxes" and added CSS style control over more elements on the site and course pages. You may need to upgrade your custom themes to get the full effect. Changes are in styles.php, config.php and one line in header.html.
The interface when courses are on front page and there is more than one category has been improved (no longer just shows short course names).
Class interface: A wrapper file provides a class interface to main Moodle library (for external programs interfacing to Moodle) - moodle/lib/makeclass.php
Small improvements and bug fixes: Quizzes now have a confirmation dialog when submitting an attempt
Courses now default to having "show recent activity" on (again).
Abolished leading zeroes in dates (introduced in last release)
Some formatting fixes for Japanese and old Netscape browsers
Teacher can allow larger assignments to be uploaded
Change password button on user page now always functions like the one on login page
Forum search now searches subjects as well as messages
Various HTML fixes
Fixes to grades display when there are no grades, also no forum ratings
Slashes in requested filenames are now stripped
Updates to the documentation

New in Moodle 1.0.6.4 (24th November, 2002) :

Authentication

Moodle now features seven different authentication mechanisms, making it possible to hook Moodle up to nearly any external list of users!

New methods just added include IMAP, POP3 and NNTP servers (including those using SSL or certificate-based authentication), and also authentication against user-specified fields in ANY external database table.

The login page can now be partially customised by the admin with personalised instructions, and the guest login can be hidden if desired.

"Mappings" can be defined so that other fields (such as email, firstname, lastname, department, language etc) can also be copied from LDAP or an external database when accounts are first used.

Finally, Moodle now sports a cool new admin GUI for configuring all of this, so it should be pretty easy now to set up external authentication. Many thanks to contributor Petri Asikainen for helping with the admin GUI.

Languages

Complete new Norwegian translation (from Jøran Sørbø), and updates for several others.

Assignments

Students can now resubmit assignments after grading if the teacher allows it

Contributed code

Standalone user-contributed code is now distributed under the /contrib directory. This directory could get quite large, and the quality/security of it has usually not been checked by me, and so this code is not included in the standard releases and nightlies. However, people who are interested in it can access it via CVS (or see CVS web view). As these new features become polished or if demand grows for them, then I'll integrate them into the main Moodle distribution.

The first contributor is Holger Schadeck (compuproggy), who has written some interesting code to help with translating all the Moodle help files. Check it out!

Bug fixes

Day value in dates (eg forum posts, weekly listing) are now displayed correctly on Windows servers.

config-dist.php and README.txt is now in DOS format to make it easier for Windows users to get started (Unix users shouldn't be affected).

Added a workaround (and new config switch in config-dist.php) for some systems which have buggy referer variables. This should help those people getting "stuck" on a form during setup.

Logout now sends you to the home page and clears the session completely.

Timezones now range between -13 to 13 hours (for daylight saving).

Character set in email now matches current language.

User pictures are now uploaded even if other fields have errors.

Full-size user pictures on user profile page no longer clickable.

Long user listing now has a small notice at the bottom about automatic unenrolment

Unenrol and change password buttons are hidden for guest student

Fixed occasional case where submitted assignments were sometimes having their owner changed.

User log graphs are now faster, cleaner and translatable.

Fixed HTML display errors with courses in category boxes on front page.

Admin and guest accounts now always work, even with external authentication activated.

Slightly more security when writing/reading files (now checks for embedded scripting).

The same user can now be deleted more than once (create, delete, recreate, delete caused error).

Language editor now works with multibyte languages (Thanks, Mits)

New in Moodle 1.0.6.3 (14th November, 2002) :

Bug fix for no-name forums.: New sites created with 1.0.6.2 had some forums appearing with no names (for example the News forum on the home page). A workaround is to add a new activity to that section (all the names will be refreshed), but this release will fix it too.
New languages!: Catalan and Spanish (Spain) translations have arrived!
Some display improvements for old Netscape browsers (headers and quizzes)
Guest language now ALWAYS the same as the current site language
"Recent Activity" can now be disabled completely if desired
For very large classes (larger than 500) participant list is not displayed

New in Moodle 1.0.6.2 (11th November, 2002) :

Course formatting improvements: The weekly and topic formats now have an extra "general" area up the top where "general" activities are listed - these are things that apply throughout the course, not just to one particular topic or week. This general area is not shown if it is completely empty.
Popup "jump" menu.: You can now jump from one activity directly to any other using a popup menu in the upper-right corner of the page
Speed improvements: Course activity details are now cached for each course, which greatly reduces the amount of database access required to display the course page. On heavily accessed systems this should improve speed.
Languages: Surveys are now completely translatable.
Admin improvements: Paging was added to the user admin page, so that the admin can now browse large numbers of users.
Fixes and tweaks: Various other small improvements to formatting

New in Moodle 1.0.6.1 (6th November, 2002) :

New assignment type: offline assignments: In addition to "upload a file" assignments, you can now have "offline" assignments. These don't require the student to do anything online. They are useful for grading activities that are not on in Moodle, and a also useful for adding "manual" columns to the grade page.
Languages: Spanish (Mexican) has been added to the distribution. Other languages have various improvements.
SMTP authentication: SMTP mail now supports SMTP username and password if needed
Documentation: Some parts rewritten, and documentation cleaned up (upgrade info now part of main docs)
Other fixes

New in Moodle 1.0.6 (26th October, 2002) :

New feature - WYSIWYG Text editing!

A WYSIWYG text editor has been added to many of the forms in Moodle. These are currently only visible when using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or later - other browsers see the normal forms exactly as before.

New feature - Quiz module!

Finally, the most requested new module is here! Multiple choice, short answer, and true-false questions with automatic marking, multiple attempts, teacher regrading and many other features. Questions are stored in a categorised database, and may be "published" to other courses.

New feature - Grade manager!

A new tool has been added for teachers to see all grades for a course on one page. You can also download/export grades as a tab-separated text file or an Excel Spreadsheet. In future more features will be added to this page like sorting, manual columns and calculations, but it's still pretty useful right now.

New feature - LDAP authentication!

Moodle can now authenticate against external directories that use the LDAP protocol (including Novell etc). Many thanks to Petri Asikainen for developing this authentication plug-in!

New feature - New smilies

Many new smilies have been added, and are now also accessible using a GUI in the text editor.

Improved text editing

You can now include all major HTML tags in all texts. This is now safe because of newly added functionality that strips all Javascript and faulty tags from texts before they can cause security or display problems.

Languages

German and Italian have been added! Many thanks to the translators (see the credits).

Reading module => Resource module

After much thought and a vote of support (21 "yes" to 6 "no") on the "Using Moodle" web site I changed the name of the "reading" module to "resource" (at the code level and also the language packs). It was better to do this earlier than later. This more generic name will be more meaningful to more people and opens the way to some real development on a resource library. But I don't want to ever change a module name again! :-) If you have any hard-coded URLs pointing to readings that you don't want to break, you can add a line like this to your Apache httpd.conf to redirect them:

Redirect /mod/reading http://yourserver.com/mod/resource

Note: if upgrading to 1.0.6 you may have some "reading" errors in "Recent activity" ... logging out and then logging in again will fix this

Other additions

An admin script to totally delete the Moodle data directory has been included (admin/delete.php) for people who need to tear down a Moodle installation but don't have root access on their server.

Miscellaneous

Many small improvements have been made to the interface, and many small bugs have been fixed. Some examples:

Big "Edit this page" buttons at the top of pages (replacing the tiny icon)
LDAP authentication module (thanks to Petri)
Authentication from external sources can now import any fields
Student assignment list now shows submission status properly
Default language for users is now the site language
Users have a 'Change Password' button on their profile page
Journals that need teacher feedback are highlighted
More documentation and more context help buttons
Database-specific upgrade code
Uses character-set codes to make the browser do the right thing
User's name in footer is now a link
News and social forums are now editable
Forums that don't allow posting don't have uneccessary "discuss" links
Improved algorithm for shortening posts in forum listings
Choice module now allows up to six choices

Older releases can be seen in the Moodle.com announcement forum.

Moodle Documentation

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