Release notes

Coming in Moodle 1.1 (20th August, 2003):

This summary is in progress and still to be finalised.

Completely new chat module for synchronous discussions

Completely new workshop module for peer grading

Completely new system for backup/restore of courses

All-new course browser (handles large numbers of courses)

Courses and categories can be hidden from students

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

THREE new quiz question types: Numerical, Description and Multianswer (Cloze)

Expanded quiz reporting

Lots of new languages

Languages now have a parent language (for displaying missing strings)

Web links can be in pop-up windows

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)

Many more improvements and fixes yet to be listed

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.

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

Moodle Documentation

Version: $Id$