Moodle Docs: Release notes

Release notes

New in Moodle 1.1.1 (10 September, 2003):


General Fixes

Translation improvements in many languages
Frame fix when switching languages in documentation
All short PHP tags removed ... short_tags is no longer a requirement
Forum search results link using anchor tag for better context
Removed target from "delete" link on user editing page
'Search' on social format moved closer to the top to prevent browser self-scrolling
Page redirection is faster and no longer causes intermediate page to be stored in IE history
Course listings improved when courses are displayed, including more information
Category listings show courses in full when there are under ten courses
Invisible courses are always shown last in My Courses
Course creators can now see all hidden categories and courses
Styles added for category and course names
Removed tags from question text on quiz 'simplestat' report
Added percentages to downloaded data from 'simplestat' report
Allow external deep linking using guest account ?username=guest
Any admin can now add/remove course creators
Primary admin can now update own username/password even with external authentication
Quizzes can now be specified as having "no grade" and no grades will be shown
When editing a language, missing strings files are created if possible
Fixed bug in weekly journal date calculations
Fixed bug in config.php that made error_reporting not work
Fixed bug when editing user name with quotes in it
Fixed bug in email obfuscation for email addresses with numbers in them
Fixed missing PostgreSQL schema for chat module
Fixed several typos in PostgreSQL upgrading code
Fixed some uninitialised variables
Several bugs fixed in Workshop module

New in Moodle 1.1 (28 August, 2003):


Major Changes

A completely new backup system for backup and restore of courses (Thanks, Eloy!)
A new workshop module for peer grading (Thanks, Ray!)
A new chat module for synchronous discussions
All-new course manager to handle very large numbers of courses (tested with 3700)
Custom-defined grading scales that can be used throughout a course
Performance improvements in many areas

General

Clean up of the whole admin menu organisation to make it clearer
Categories can be nested and sorted alphabetically or manually
Courses and whole categories can be hidden from students
Course descriptions and names can be searched for keywords
Large categories are now completely paged
Improved web caching for stylesheets and images
"My courses" display on the home page when logged in.
Inclusion of non-linked page to display ALL user pictures at once (see /userpix)
The "secureforms" feature now defaults to OFF.
Moodle now doesn't care if "magic quotes" is on or off.
Images in /pix were rearranged and tidied up
HTML email is better formatted for wider compatibility
Mail bounces are now sent to the admin user
Better cron tasks (less CPU used) and duplicate enrolments are now cleaned
Improved display of logs with infinite paging and increased flexibility
User log graphs now work at site-level (showing ALL logs on the site)
People with manual accounts can now recover their password
Improved system for defining/printing help files for major activity modules
Activity modules can now have settings
Email addresses are all completely obfuscated (to fool web spiders)
There is now an index to the help files
Library (Mark Kimes' add-on) is now supported if it is installed (see Moodle contrib for Library source)


Courses

Teachers can now have their course editing privileges removed
Teachers can now manually enrol students if they want to
Teacher management is now all combined in one interface
Activities can be moved any distance with two clicks
Topics/weeks can now be moved up and down
Pop-up menu to quickly switch between topics/weeks when collapsed
When self-enrolling, students are notified and given a chance to cancel
Teachers and students see list of "My Courses" on course home pages.
Grades can be hidden from students if not needed


Languages

Hungarian and Greek have been added, and there are lots of other updates. As usual, the language packs within this release may not be fully completed yet. You can always download the newest language packs from http://moodle.org/download/lang/.
Updates and fixes to most languages
Languages now have a parent language (for displaying missing strings)
Some fixes for locales and time display in several languages
es_mx is being phased out in favour of "es" (International Spanish)


Forum

Much improved searching, with multiple keywords, paging etc
Forum grading can be either off, used by everyone, or used only by teachers
Forum grading can use custom scales or numbers
A date range can be set to restrict the posts that can be graded.
Admin now has access to some settings via Admin -> Modules -> Forums
After editing a post, user is returned to post in context
Attached images are displayed inline
Email copies in plain text format now print URLs nicely

Quiz

New question type: Embedded Answers (Cloze) - allows text passages with embedded answers
New question type: Numerical - allows a range of numerical answers to be entered
New question type: Description - not a real question, it allows text/graphics to be inserted anywhere
Expanded quiz reporting with modular report plugins
New feature for repeat attempts, where each attempt builds on the last
If the quiz is closing within the next 24 hours, a small countdown clock is shown in the title bar and alerts warn at ten minutes and zero minutes.
Some refactoring to the quiz code to make it easier to extend with new question types


Resources

Web links can now be in very customisable pop-up windows.
Admin now has access to some settings via Admin -> Modules -> Resources

Some of the more annoying bugs recently fixed

Moving posts now also moves attachments
No more warnings when looking for uploaded files in an empty course
Students no longer always get plain-format mail on force-subscribed forums
Cookies can no longer interfere with the admin setup during installation
Effectively no limit to the number of activities per section
Several fixes when dealing with zip files, especially on Windows
Admins can now edit accounts created from external databases
Session no longer conflicts with other software
Excel files now work on non-Intel machines

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

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