Latest release notes

Latest Release notes - Moodle 1.5 (5th June, 2005)

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

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

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

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)

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.

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)

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.

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

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