Moodle 1.5.3 release notes

Release date: 11th November 2005

(Because this release contains important security fixes, we highly advise that sites using any previous version of Moodle upgrade to this version as soon as possible.)

A few new things

• We now have SCORM 1.3 (SCORM 2004) support!
• Much improved Assignment grading interface, including "quick grading" options
• A new Single-Sign-On API is available

Various fixes

General

• Contains warnings when Moodle is used on an PHP configuration known to be insecure
• Contains fixes for some recently reported security problems (see security.moodle.org)
• Backups now runs a lot faster medium/large installs. Many issues fixed in this area
• Listing of directory sizes can be made much faster on Linux/Unix servers, thanks to a performance fix you can enable from Admin->Variables: "path_to_du"
• We now log more meaningful IP addresses when the server or the clients are working behind a proxy
• Fixed some issues with PHP accelerators
• Upgrade scripts have been refined and work much better for PostgreSQL installations
• General PostgreSQL port code cleanup
• Upgrading to 1.5.3 will fix any legacy Journal to Online Assignment upgrade issues
• RSS libraries now support RSS 2.0 categories, see bug 3654
• Better accesibilty in file uploads, see bug 3662
• Better support for site-wide HTTPS, see bug 3848
• We now send away bots (like Googlebot) from that try mangled URLs, see bug 3958
• Better DST support for non-logged-in users
• Better DST support for repeat events in Calendar
• Small fixes to the lesson, choice and grade modules
• Minor CSS improvements to formal_white and orangewhite themes
• Better pagination in course listing and loglive pages
• Fixed an IE-only bug related to HTMLArea content where user-edited tables could float and hide part of the UI.

Authentication

• Fixes to change password/forgotten password with external auth
• Data fetched from external DB or LDAP is now truncated correctly
• Fixed bug 4305 -- better login block behaviour when using secureforms
• Better support for utf-8 user data from external auth
• LDAP: General fixes covering sync_users script and logging of errors
• LDAP: Fixed bug 3141 - Can't update external data with LDAP authentication
• LDAP: Fixed bug 3992 - LDAP password including a quote does not work - credits go to Kita
• LDAP: Better support for ActiveDirectory.
• LDAP: Fixed bug #3594
• LDAP: Better handling of multi-source field mapping
• LDAP: Fix for using DN as idnumber - thanks fo Jeff Graham - http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=28840

Enrolment and metacourses

• Metacourses: Prevent normal users to gain access to meta courses via manual enrolment
• Metacourses: better support for MySQL v3.23.x
• DB: Enrolment lookups now work reliably with Moodle on MySQL and Postgres
• DB: Non-MySQL databases work again as external enrolment databases
• LDAP: Fixed a wrong call to add_teacher in LDAP plugin.
• LDAP: Servers being down or unavailable no longer prevent logins
• LDAP: Course auto-creation works again
• LDAP: Fixed several bugs reported by Jeff Graham and Barron Koralesky -- including bugs 3912 and 3974
• LDAP: We can now bind non-anonymously to LDAP
• Authorize.net: several fixes

Resources

• Bugfix: Avoid linking to empty or unlinkable activity names

Forums

• Big and small optimizations to tracking of read/unread messages, specially for PostgreSQL
• Fixed some PostgreSQL bugs
• Some more actions are now supported by backup/restore when processing log records, see bug 3582
• Now message forum RSS feeds are including category data -- useful under some RSS agregators able to group messages, see bug 3654
• Fixed paging on forum search

Blocks

• Several performance improvements
• Fixes to the upgrade process, including PostgreSQL syntax and lower memory usage
• Brought in several bugfixes from 1.6dev
• Fixed bug 3478: Cannot add RSS feed as course creator
• Fixed bug 3793: Prevent warning message when configuring a glossary_random block in a course which has no glossaries

Quiz

• Some CSS style fixes
• Better compatibility with themes that contain forms in the headers
• Highlighting of correct answers can now be turned off
• Fixed bug 3986: Too many random questions. (mindforge)
• Fixed missing action icons
• Fixed bug 3899 and removed some 'missing course object' messages
• Fixed bug 3950: Ee-attempt button inconsistency for multi-attempt quizzes
• Fixed bug 3953: Quiz/report.php pagesize can be set to 0, credits to Jean-Michel
• Fixed potential data data corruption bug 3915
• Fixed bug 3884: Quiz correct highlights missing for 2 of 3 options.
• Fix for the Student review highlight doesn't seem to work bug
• Fixed bug 3804: Differences in question types between 1.5 and 1.6
• Fixed bug 3822: don't count previews as attempts
• Fixed bug 3807: Question numbering issue
• Fixes for the item analysis plug-in, assembled by Jean-Michel
• Now we reset the timeout counter to avoid timeouts
• Several improvements contributed by Jean-Michel Vedrine. You can now change the number of attempts per page displayed on screen, and download results to Excel/text file, including detailed grades
• Fixed export bug with non-English languages

SCORM

• We now support SCORM 1.3 (SCORM 2004)!
• Fixed a bug with next and prev SCO search
• Fixed bugs related to masteryscore
• Fixed a problem in AICC course tracking

Wiki

• Now paging of older versions is showed and working properly, see bug 3750

Filters

• Mediaplugin filter now finds multi-line links in HTML code
• Censor filter: Added original word as title to the blacked-out version. The filter can obscure actual important words by mistake (eg Dickens) and there needs to be some way to recover the meaning