Moodle 2.2 release notes

Release date: soon!

Here is the full list of fixed issues in 2.2 (Long!)

Major new features

MDL-29108 - Rubrics (the first of our new Advanced grading methods)
MDL-20534 - New External tool activity module supporting LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)
MDL-29956 - IMS Common Cartridge import
MDL-27622 - MyMobile theme
MDL-21676 - Gravatar integration, enabling gravatars to be used as user pictures
MDL-27256 - SCORM - New interactions report (GSOC Project)

Other highlights

MDL-28455 - TinyMCE editor upgraded. Safari on iPad/iPhone with iOS5 now works!
MDL-27242 - Conditional activities can now become available at an exact time, rather than only a date
MDL-28646 - A new Mobile app button 'content' enables all resources in a course to be downloaded for offline viewing
MDL-26477 - Navigation block now links to topic/weekly sections
MDL-28270 - Option to upload users to a cohort, add users to a cohort in bulk and other cohort improvements
MDL-29719 - Course listings can now optionally display course short name everywhere
MDL-27001 - Activity descriptions can now be displayed on course homepages
MDL-27036, MDL-30146 - SCORM AICC - improvements to handling of external AICC packages.

Security issues

To be released later

For developers: API changes

Core API changes

https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/master/lib/upgrade.txt
MDL-29474 - Plugins should declare if they depend on other plugins
MDL-28554 - Upgrade to YUI 3.4.0 and 2.9.0
MDL-26796 - We no longer accept arrays in required_param() and optional_param()

New plugin types

Plugin API changes

DB changes

MDL-29313 - Length limit for VARCHAR columns under all Databases has been raised to 1333 chars. This will allow using that column type to store URLs and longer contents in general.
Specifically for Oracle installations:
- MDL-29322 - All VARCHAR2 columns will be created using CHAR semantics instead of default BYTE semantics in Moodle 2.2 and upwards. This provides better cross-db compatibility and improves storage of longer Unicode strings.
- MDL-29416 - For all existing sites, one new report has been added under Admin -> Development -> XMLDB Editor -> Check semantics, able to detect all the "old" BYTE semantics remaining in the database and generate the SQL statements needed to move them to proper CHAR semantics.

Libraries deleted from distribution

This is the list of some outdated / unused libraries that aren't bundled anymore with Moodle 2.2 and upwards. Any (contrib / custom) plugin using them should change to better alternatives or include its own copy of them:

MDL-29884 - lib/base32.php
MDL-29885 - lib/csshover.htc
MDL-29886 - lib/md5.js
MDL-29883 - lib/mp3player
MDL-29671 - lib/odbc.php
MDL-29882 - lib/overlib
MDL-29914 - lib/pear/PHP/CodeSniffer
MDL-29881 - lib/profilerlib.php and lib/pear/Console/Getopt
MDL-29922 - lib/smarty (with the question format IMS QTI 2.0 also being removed - MDL-29921)
MDL-29887 - lib/swfobject/swfobject.js

Webservice changes

MDL-20804 - SOAP server can now publish detailed object structures via WSDL
MDL-29106 - New naming convention
MDL-29435 - SOAP/XML-RPC return clear error message when Moodle debug mode >= NORMAL
MDL-29277 - Any error at the web service description level is clearly indicated => which parameter/returned value is wrong, and what was expected.
MDL-29279 - REST server can return JSON
MDL-29276 - Many other web service improvements
Many web service demo clients
Full web service user and developer documentation update.
New web service roadmap

Documentation