Moodle 2.1 release notes

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Moodle 2.1

Released: 1st July 2011

Major new features

New question engine

Moodle question system has been rewritten to make it much more robust and to support lots of new possible functionality.
See summary of changes at the New question engine page and more details in the tracker MDL-20636.
Warning: This change requires a major database upgrade. If you have a lot of question attempts in your site, you probably need to plan your upgrade in stages, using some extra code that is not in the core system.
Backward compatibility warning: Random short-answer matching question type was moved out of the main Moodle distribution.

Ability to restore the course contents from Moodle 1.9 backup files

Course backup files created in Moodle 1.9 can be now restored during the normal restore process.
No user data (like forum posts, grades, submissions, ...) are supported yet. Blocks are not restored yet.
See MDL-22414 for details.

Support for mobile devices

Moodle 2.1 comes with a built-in web service designed for mobile applications (required to run the official Moodle app)
See MDL-27551 and Enable mobile web services documentation for details
MDL-25394 Improved Support for Mobile Themes and Browser Detection

Other highlights

MDL-11288 Ability to copy (or clone) an activity
MDL-27428 Ability to navigate navigation/settings menu and dock with keyboard
MDL-26784 Improved plugins check/overview page
MDL-27500 Upgraded TinyMCE to the latest version 3.4.2
MDL-26105 User friendly block settings and help information
MDL-27251 New performance setting for calculating an appropriate timeout during large cURL requests
MDL-25805 Friendlier navigation for parent roles to see mentees in courses
MDL-27577 Daylight saving should be calculated for users having string timezone
MDL-27171 Messaging Improvements: Site administrators can now control which message delivery methods can be used for each message type. (In 2.0 students could switch off notifications. In 2.1 this can be overidden)

Security issues

There were no significant security issues fixed in this release.

Upgrading

When upgrading to Moodle 2.1, you must first upgrade to Moodle 1.9 or (preferably) 2.0. We advise that you test the upgrade first on a COPY of your production site, to make sure it works as you expect.

Please also check that you have PHP 5.3.2 or later, as the minimum required version has increased since Moodle 2.0.

For further information, see Upgrading to Moodle 2.1.

For developers: API changes

The new question engine changes the API for question types. See dev:Developing a Question Type.
The new question engine changes the API for activity modules that use the question bank. See dev:Using the question engine from module.
There is a new API available for activity modules to support restore of 1.9 backup files. See dev:Backup 1.9 conversion for developers
The Messaging API now allows plugin creators to specify default message providers for message outputs. See dev:Messaging_2.0_improvements#Adding_new_message_type
MDL-28166 Note that the two events triggered by the quiz module (quiz_attempt_started and quiz_attempt_~~processed~~submitted) changed slightly to follow a more consistent naming scheme. We do not believe they were used much, so we decided to fix them now, so we could have a nice, stable API in the future.

Documentation