moodle/doc/release.html
2002-12-09 07:45:45 +00:00

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<TITLE>Moodle Docs: Release notes</TITLE>
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<H2>Release notes</H2>
<H3> New in Moodle 1.0.7: </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). Other languages contain some updates.</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. 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).
</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> Bug fixes</DT>
<DD>
<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: </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: </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: </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: </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: </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>&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>