Latest release notes
From MoodleDocs
Latest Release notes - Moodle 1.5 (5th June, 2005)
Headline features
- Web pages are compliant with XHTML Transitional 1.0
- Improved Accessibility, aiming for compliance with WAI (W3C), SENDA (UK) and Section 508 (US) criteria.
- Very strong new Themes system, allowing cascading themes, user themes, course themes, with very fine control of every page in Moodle via CSS.
- Integrated Messaging feature for direct communication between all users in the site, featuring realtime popup windows, notification, email copies, blocking, history, WYSIWYG editor, etc
- Forum read/unread tracking with highlights allows you to see new postings at a glance and to control how these are displayed (per forum, per user or per site).
- New Blocks system, allowing multiple copies of blocks and better block configuration
- Full support for Daylight Savings Time in every locality around the globe, so everyone always see the correct local time for all events.
- New extended gradebook allowing custom weighting of different activities, setting extra grades (or taking out others) and improved display and sorting options
- Users can be required to agree to a Site Policy
Other Major System-wide Improvements
Admin
- New "maintenance mode" allows the admin to temporarily disable a site (during upgrades, for example).
- Moodle can automatically download a new list of timezones from moodle.org or elsewhere and install it to the database (Olson files are supported too)
- New version of Moodle MySQL Admin module (available separately)
- New calendar options page provides user interface to configure the behavior of the calendar
Authentication
- New Shibboleth Support
- New CAS Support
- New PAM Support
- Improved LDAP integration, so that LDAP can now control course creation, group assignments. Increased performance and scalability performing user synchronisation.
- Certain user fields can be locked by the admin when using external authentication
- Improved session handling now detects "crossover" sessions that we have found in some buggy PHP installations and prevents them
- Sessions can now be stored in the database (good for clustered installations!)
- Users can be forced to change their password
Files
- Standardised file browsing in all areas
- Improved uploading, with support for automated Virus scanning of new documents using ClamAV.
- Slasharguments now work also on IIS (upgrade to PHP 4.3.11 needed for ISAPI)
Filters
- Standardised filter library makes it trivial to write new filters that require searching and highlighting of text.
- Huge efficiency improvements for complex filters like the Glossary filter
- New Tidy filter uses the W3C Tidy program to (optionally) clean all user-entered texts throughout the site and convert it to valid XHTML code
- Improved censorship filter, now "blacks out" words using styles and uses a word list from the language packs.
- Improved Flash MP3 player, now shows progress bar while downloading and playing
- Improved Multi-language filter is faster, more forgiving of syntax errors, and uses new editor-friendly syntax:
- Auto-linking filters (glossary, activities) can work to link all the occurrences (old behaviour), once for each text block or only once for the whole page ($CFG->filtermatchonepertext, $CFG->filtermatchoneperpage).
- More text can now be filtered in Moodle, including activity names, headings and other such small texts. This makes it possible to design completely multi-lingual sites in Moodle that fully appears in the user's chosen language.
Themes
- Modules can provide standard styles
- Themes can override required styles of other themes
- Users and courses can choose their own themes if the admin allows it
- Implementation of tabs interface on many pages
- Modules, Blocks and Languages can define their own standard styles
HTML Editor
- The toolbuttons offered in the editor toolbar are now configurable by the admin
- Search and Replace text within the editor text area (with optional use of regular expressions)
Course management
- Transparent Blackboard 5.5 course importing (partial 6.0 support)
- The new meta-courses allow to get users automatically enroled in a general course (the metacourse) when enroled in any of the metacourse-linked courses
- New tool to copy content from a course to other.
New blocks
- HTML block: allowing to place arbitrary content (text, images links) in any course mainpage
- Remote RSS feed: allows to display external news channels inside a Moodle course
- Glossary Selection: to choose and display content from a Moodle glossary in course mainpage
Calendar
- Major speed improvements for sites with a large number of courses using groups
- Repeating events can now be modified or deleted all at the same time or separately as before
- New "remember filter settings" preference that allows calendar filters to remember their status between logins