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<TITLE>Moodle Docs: Release notes</TITLE>
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<H2>Release notes</H2>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.9 (Due for release 29th May, 2003) :</H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> General</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Various optimisations and significant performance enhancements
<LI>Moodle is now well-behaved when enclosed within a frame
<LI>Richtext editor can now be used in more text-editing fields
<LI>New format "Plain text format", useful when posting code or HTML.
<LI>New format "Wiki format", allows Wiki-style tagging in most places
<LI>Ability to specify permissions of new folders and files created on the server
<LI>Some fixes for servers running in Safe Mode (some file problems remain)
<LI>Various fixes for cleaning some external text of quotes, etc
<LI>Various fixes for PostgreSQL 7.3 compatibility
</DD>
<DT> Languages</DT>
<DD>
<LI>8 new language packs! Argentinian Spanish, Czech, Portuguese, Slovakian, Romanian, Danish, Russian and Polish.
<LI>Fixes and upgrades to almost all language packs
<LI>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
<LI>Truetype fonts are now part of the language packs
<LI>ALL dates/times can now be reformatted as part of the language pack
</DD>
<DT> Developers</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Global debug variable gives more feedback about uninitialised variables and the like
<LI>Various fixes to tidy up and further standardise some of the PHP code
<LI>Various fixes for robustness (ensuring variables are always initialised)
</DD>
<DT> Admin</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Better checking of PHP environment during installation, with warnings
<LI>Admin directory can be moved from /admin to something else (see config-dist.php)
<LI>User listing is now paged, and can now be searched for strings
<LI>Improvements to the language editing page
</DD>
<DT> User management</DT>
<DD>
<LI>New role: Course creator - just like teacher but can also create new courses
<LI>New authentication plug-in named "manual", prevents users from creating their own accounts
<LI>"Forgot Password" routine now uses an email confirmation before resetting password
</DD>
<DT> Courses</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Activities on the course page now have a little button to hide/show that activity to students
<LI>Some paging on the display of participants, to cope with very large classes
<LI>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.
</DD>
<DT> Assignments</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Assignment submissions can be sorted
<LI>Assignment notification mail isn't sent to unenrolled students
</DD>
<DT> Forums</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Display of forum discussions list is greatly improved
<LI>Whole discussions can be moved to any other forum with a single click
<LI>Date/time of posts is now "last modified", not "created"
<LI>Blank subject-lines or messages are now prevented
<LI>More intelligent parsing and display of text in posts
<LI>Force Subscribe now works on the "Site News" forum (mails all active students/teachers)
<LI>Better handling of mailouts to prevent the possibility of double copies
that sometimes happened with very large classes
</DD>
<DT> Workshop Assignment module</DT>
<DD>
<LI>A very interesting new module contributed by Ray Kingdon,
<LI>A flexible tool that implements a variety of peer-grading and
example-setting schemes that involve a whole group in examining
and grading peices of work.
</DD>
<DT> Quizzes</DT>
<DD>
<LI>New question type, Random Question (selects from all questions in the same category)
<LI>New question type, Matching Question (student must match answers to questions)
<LI>New question type, Random Matching Short-Answers (randomly creates Matching Questions
from the available Short Answer questions in the same category)
<LI>Quiz question import from text files (modular design allows expansion to new formats - a beta Blackboard module is included)
<LI>'Create multiple questions' wizard to quickly create a random quiz
<LI>Quiz questions may be randomly shuffled
<LI>Quiz answers (multiple choice, etc) may be randomly shuffled
<LI>Fixed off-by-one error when "Save Grades" button wasn't used.
<LI>Regrading works properly if the quiz has been changed
<LI>Editing a question after it's already been used in a quiz no longer affects quiz results
<LI>Multiple choice answers are labelled a,b,c not 1,2,3
</DD>
<DT> Resources</DT>
<DD>
<LI>Better performance when editing large text or HTML resources
<LI>Plain images are now display centered within a proper web page (not raw).
<LI>Wiki format added as a new option for Resource pages
</DD>
<DT> Custom Themes</DT>
<DD>
<LI>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. <B>If you are using a local custom theme then
have a close look at theme/standard/styles.php to see the new additions.</B>
<LI>Custom themes now have the capability to alter the little button graphics.
There is a new entry in theme/x/config.php ($THEME->custompix) and a new
subdirectory "pix". See the theme cordoroyblue for an example.
</DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.8.1 (12th January, 2003) :</H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> No new features, just bug fixes:</DT>
<DD>
<LI> Fixed one-in-a-million bug with email confirmations
<LI> Quiz feedback text can be styled
<LI> Deals better with a new module that is not readable
<LI> Fixed bug when setting times for assignments, quizzes when the teacher is in a different timezone to the server
<LI> Fixed listing of calendar months on some servers
<LI> Richtext editor now works properly in choice module
<LI> More robust when looking for some environment variables
<LI> Installer checks that sessions directory is writeable
<LI> Added a small test program to test sessions support
</DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.8 (6th January, 2003) :</H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> Databases</DT>
<DD> Moodle now has complete native support support for <B>PostgreSQL 7</B> 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.</DD>
<DT> Languages </DT>
<DD> <B><U>Six</U> new languages have been added!</B> Chinese (from Zhang Dexuan),
Arabic (from Ahmed Nabil), Turkish (from M. C<>neyt Birk<72>k), 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.</DD>
<DT> Layout</DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Themes </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Resources</DT>
<DD> 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. </DD>
<DT> Choices</DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Grades</DT>
<DD> Students can now see all their own grades for a course on one page, accessible
from the course home page.</DD>
<DT> Quizzes</DT>
<DD> Students can now review all their past quiz attempts, but only if the quiz has been closed,
and if the teacher allows it.</DD>
<DT> Authorisation </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Administration </DT>
<DD> 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 <A HREF="http://moodle.com/mod/resource/view.php?id=8">moodle-1.0.8-mysql-admin.zip</A>).</DD>
<DT> Debugging mode </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Other things</DT>
<DD>
<LI> Unpacked template module is ignored by Moodle.
<LI> A default country can be set by the admin
<LI> View source button in Richtext editor was missing with some languages
<LI> A bug affecting grades page on some installations was fixed.
<LI> File upload problems on 4.3.0 have been fixed.
<LI> Some minor problems with the display of logs has been fixed.
<LI> Improved GD detection that works with PHP 4.3.0
<LI> If GD is not present then Moodle is now more usable (just less capable)
<LI> A bug causing the wrong display of the date has been fixed.
<LI> Usernames can now contain "." and "-" characters.
<LI> Cookies now use table prefixes for unique naming, so that many
different moodle sites can be run on the same web site and database.
<LI> Site news forum heading can now be changed (edit the forum).
<LI> Improved code for gathering form input
<LI> The buggy_referrer variable is fixed and now works as expected
<LI> Some small performance improvements here and there
<LI> Other improvements I probably forgot to add here
<LI> Many little code clean-ups.
</DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.7 (10th December, 2002): </H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> Simpler version numbers!</DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Languages</DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Database access</DT>
<DD> ADOdb was upgraded to 2.50 which should fix some problems with very
new versions of PHP (4.3.0).</DD>
<DT> Layout improvements</DT>
<DD> 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.
<P>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).</P>
</DD>
<DT> Class interface</DT>
<DD> A wrapper file provides a class interface to main Moodle library
(for external programs interfacing to Moodle) - moodle/lib/makeclass.php</DD>
<DT> Small improvements and bug fixes</DT>
<DD>
<LI> Quizzes now have a confirmation dialog when submitting an attempt
<LI> Courses now default to having "show recent activity" on (again).
<LI> Abolished leading zeroes in dates (introduced in last release)
<LI> Some formatting fixes for Japanese and old Netscape browsers
<LI> Teacher can allow larger assignments to be uploaded
<LI> Change password button on user page now always functions like the one on login page
<LI> Forum search now searches subjects as well as messages
<LI> Various HTML fixes
<LI> Fixes to grades display when there are no grades, also no forum ratings
<LI> Slashes in requested filenames are now stripped
<LI> Updates to the documentation
</DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.6.4 (24th November, 2002) : </H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> Authentication</DT>
<DD> Moodle now features seven different authentication mechanisms,
making it possible to hook Moodle up to nearly any external list
of users!</P>
<P>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.</P>
<P>The login page can now be partially customised
by the admin with personalised instructions, and the guest login can be
hidden if desired. </P>
<P>"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.</P>
<P>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.</P></DD>
<DT> Languages</DT>
<DD> Complete new Norwegian translation (from J<>ran S<>rb<72>), and updates for several others.</DD>
<DT> Assignments</DT>
<DD> Students can now resubmit assignments after grading if the teacher allows it</DD>
<DT> Contributed code</DT>
<DD> 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 <A HREF="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/moodle/moodle/contrib/">CVS web view</A>). As these new features become polished or if demand grows for them,
then I'll integrate them into the main Moodle distribution.
<BR><BR>
The first contributor is Holger Schadeck (compuproggy), who has written some <A HREF="http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/moodle/moodle/contrib/compuproggy/">interesting code</A> to help with translating all the Moodle help files. Check it out!</DD>
<DT> Bug fixes</DT>
<DD>
<LI> Day value in dates (eg forum posts, weekly listing) are
now displayed correctly on Windows servers.
<LI> 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).
<LI> 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.
<LI> Logout now sends you to the home page and clears the session completely.
<LI> Timezones now range between -13 to 13 hours (for daylight saving).
<LI> Character set in email now matches current language.
<LI> User pictures are now uploaded even if other fields have errors.
<LI> Full-size user pictures on user profile page no longer clickable.
<LI> Long user listing now has a small notice at the bottom about automatic unenrolment
<LI> Unenrol and change password buttons are hidden for guest student
<LI> Fixed occasional case where submitted assignments were sometimes having their owner changed.
<LI> User log graphs are now faster, cleaner and translatable.
<LI> Fixed HTML display errors with courses in category boxes on front page.
<LI> Admin and guest accounts now always work, even with external authentication activated.
<LI> Slightly more security when writing/reading files (now checks for embedded scripting).
<LI> The same user can now be deleted more than once (create, delete, recreate, delete caused error).
<LI> Language editor now works with multibyte languages (Thanks, Mits)
</DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.6.3 (14th November, 2002) : </H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> Bug fix for no-name forums.</DT>
<DD> 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. </DD>
<DT> New languages!</DT>
<DD> Catalan and Spanish (Spain) translations have arrived!</DD>
<DT> Some display improvements for old Netscape browsers (headers and quizzes)</DT>
<DT> Guest language now ALWAYS the same as the current site language</DT>
<DT> "Recent Activity" can now be disabled completely if desired </DT>
<DT> For very large classes (larger than 500) participant list is not displayed</DT>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.6.2 (11th November, 2002) : </H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> Course formatting improvements </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Popup "jump" menu. </DT>
<DD> You can now jump from one activity directly to any other using a
popup menu in the upper-right corner of the page</DD>
<DT> Speed improvements </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Languages </DT>
<DD> Surveys are now completely translatable.</DD>
<DT> Admin improvements </DT>
<DD> Paging was added to the user admin page, so that the admin can now
browse large numbers of users. </DD>
<DT> Fixes and tweaks </DT>
<DD> Various other small improvements to formatting</DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.6.1 (6th November, 2002) : </H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> New assignment type: offline assignments </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Languages </DT>
<DD> Spanish (Mexican) has been added to the distribution. Other languages have various improvements.</DD>
<DT> SMTP authentication </DT>
<DD> SMTP mail now supports SMTP username and password if needed</DD>
<DT> Documentation </DT>
<DD> Some parts rewritten, and documentation cleaned up (upgrade info now part of main docs)</DD>
<DT> Other fixes </DT>
<UL><LI>Better checking on teachers using "loginas" to stop them roaming other courses as a student
<LI>While using "loginas", teachers can return to their own identity using a link in the footer
<LI>Some strings fixed in assignments, journals, and forums.
<LI>Guest language is now the same as the site
<LI>etc
</UL></DD>
</DL></UL>
<HR>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.6 (26th October, 2002) : </H3>
<UL><DL>
<DT> New feature - WYSIWYG Text editing! </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> New feature - Quiz module! </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> New feature - Grade manager! </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> New feature - LDAP authentication! </DT>
<DD> 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!</DD>
<DT> New feature - New smilies </DT>
<DD> Many new smilies have been added, and are now also accessible using a GUI in the text editor.</DD>
<DT> Improved text editing </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Languages </DT>
<DD> German and Italian have been added! Many thanks to the translators (see the credits).</DD>
<DT> Reading module => Resource module </DT>
<DD> 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:
<P><CODE>Redirect /mod/reading http://yourserver.com/mod/resource</CODE></P>
<FONT COLOR=RED>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</FONT></DD>
<DT> Other additions </DT>
<DD> 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.</DD>
<DT> Miscellaneous </DT>
<DD> Many small improvements have been made to the interface, and many small bugs have been fixed.
Some examples:
<UL>
<LI> Big "Edit this page" buttons at the top of pages (replacing the tiny icon)
<LI> LDAP authentication module (thanks to Petri)
<LI> Authentication from external sources can now import any fields
<LI> Student assignment list now shows submission status properly
<LI> Default language for users is now the site language
<LI> Users have a 'Change Password' button on their profile page
<LI> Journals that need teacher feedback are highlighted
<LI> More documentation and more context help buttons
<LI> Database-specific upgrade code
<LI> Uses character-set codes to make the browser do the right thing
<LI> User's name in footer is now a link
<LI> News and social forums are now editable
<LI> Forums that don't allow posting don't have uneccessary "discuss" links
<LI> Improved algorithm for shortening posts in forum listings
<LI> Choice module now allows up to six choices
</UL>
</DD>
</DL></UL>
<P>Older releases can be seen in the <A HREF="http://moodle.com/mod/forum/view.php?f=1">Moodle.com announcement forum</A>.
<P>&nbsp;</P>
<P ALIGN="CENTER"><FONT SIZE="1"><A HREF="../doc/" TARGET="_top">Moodle Documentation</A></FONT></P>
<P ALIGN="CENTER"><FONT SIZE="1">Version: $Id$</FONT></P>
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