Moodle 3.1 release notes

Releases > Moodle 3.1 release notes

Release date: 23 May 2016 (Not yet released)

Here is the full list of fixed issues in 3.1.

Important:

• PHP extension xmlreader is now required (MDL-51603).

Major features

Highlights

• MDL-53451 - Competencies support in Moodle
• MDL-52954 - Improvements to the Assignment grading user interface
• MDL-31989 - Global Search API allows to search forums, wikis and other content throughout the whole site. Installation and setup of SOLR server is required,
• MDL-52002 - Significant performance improvements in gradebook calculations
• MDL-48012 - Recycle bin plugin is now part of standard Moodle distribution: allow instructors to "undo" deletions of course modules and courses. Moodle Users Association project
• MDL-49279 - Add support in moodle plugins for exporting "Mobile app addons"

Forum

• MDL-372 - Allow to "pin" discussions to keep them always on the top of the list
• MDL-34160 - Allow forum email subject to be customised
• MDL-47365 - Add permalink option to forum posts
• MDL-51214 - Rename the News forum to "Announcements"
• MDL-44087 - Forum does not observe message notification settings for digest emails
• MDL-53050 - Highlight the selected forum post when deep linking with a #anchor

Assignment

• MDL-52397 - ??? Assign feedback not sent if assign grade timemodified is set two days ago
• MDL-52596 - Add a 'maxperpage' site wide setting for grading table size (to mitigate broken grading pages in large courses)
• MDL-52269 - Not obvious to tell if an assignment is in blind marking if user holds the "mod/assign:viewblinddetails" capabilty
• MDL-52270 - Difficult to cross reference users with their blind identities
• MDL-44598 - List student names on 'grant extension' screen
• MDL-52490 - Download selected assign submissions as a zip file
• MDL-52290 - EditPDF - Also show the total page number in the pagination
• MDL-52489 - "Download all submissions as a zip" should maintain the folder structure in students submissions

LTI

• MDL-52154 - Rework LTI admin screens
• MDL-45064 - Option to add Preconfigured LTI Tool to Activity Chooser
• MDL-52035 - Integrate LTI Provider support in Moodle as the Publish as LTI tool
• MDL-52821 - Compliance: Send tool_consumer_instance_description in LTI launch request

Feedback

• MDL-53738 - Feedback activity module will be enabled by default in new 3.1 installations. If you are upgrading to 3.1 we recommend you to enable it manually.
• MDL-52094 - Various improvements to UI and bug fixes, including:
  • Performance improvement to download responses as raw data in multiple formats (CSV, Excel, etc.) - now available on "Show responses" page instead of "Analysis"
  • Allow any characters in labels, do not display empty labels
  • Do not display empty pages
  • Map frontpage feedback to multiple courses without leaving the form
  • Improved display of automatic question numbers
  • Disable "Response time" for anonymous feedbacks
  • Use moodleforms to display feedback

SCORM

• MDL-45712 - Add Result field to the SCORM Interactions Report
• MDL-48680 - Add score and status submission events to SCORM activity
• MDL-42473 - Add group support to SCORM activity

Quiz

• MDL-52738 - Quiz attempt/review page should have a previous button to match next
• MDL-46092 - Add the OU styling of the Quiz navigation into Moodle core as the default
• MDL-46091 - Rationalise confirmations when you start a quiz
• MDL-52806 - Show right answers when manually grading automatically marked questions
• MDL-53304 - Immediate feedback behaviours should not show a disabled check button when you can't use it

Other activity modules

• MDL-42190 - Workshop: Possibility to delete a submission
• MDL-51306 - Folder: Bulk download all files within a folder activity as ZIP file
• MDL-52414 - Lesson: Allow Default Settings for Lesson Module Settings
• MDL-51267 - URL/File: Make setting up a URL/File resource more obvious
• MDL-50794 - Workshop: Restricting file types as attachments to a workshop

Gradebook

• MDL-48634 - Option to rescale existing grades when changing max points
• MDL-52522 - grade_minmaxtouse should be respected for overridden categories
• MDL-51900 - Tab Down Grade Column in Single View of Gradebook
• MDL-52309 - Make Grade History report require user to submit parameters before the report starts running

Performance

• MDL-51374 - Do not purge entire databasemeta cache when there are structure changes (esp temp tables).
• MDL-51603 - Refactor downloading of csv, ods, excel etc files in reports and exports across moodle to stream progressively
• MDL-34925 - Improve bulk user export performance
• MDL-50385 - Performance improvement to the grade history report

Tagging

• MDL-50851 - Introduce tag collections - ability to separate independent tag areas
• MDL-52252 - Add tags to modules (Resources and Activities)
• MDL-25742 - Allow to search wiki pages by tags
• MDL-51283 - Rename "official" tags to "standard", allow admin to set for each tag area how to use standard tags
• MDL-16855 - Add tag filtering to "Manage tags" page
• MDL-52707 - Allow tags to be combined

Usability

• MDL-27628 - Enrol meta: Possible to add multiple courses without leaving the form
• MDL-51818 - Move the profile 'Message' button to be next to the user picture
• MDL-52258 - Calendar now shows duration in calendar block
• MDL-53043 - Move user search box above the students list in the manual enrolments popup
• MDL-35590 - Navigation block redesign to meet ARIA specification (documentation)
• MDL-49963 - Allow to message all participants when there are more than one page in participants list
• MDL-51354 - Help popup and improved name for events dropdown menu on the course and site logs pages
• MDL-53026 - Use inplace editable for editing cohort names
• MDL-51706 - Move plagiarism links to the top of the summary and full text outputs
• MDL-53382 - "Show all" link on participants page should be moved beneath the page switcher

Other improvements

• MDL-53057 - Add search feature to the File system repository
• MDL-48506 - Improve memcached cache store so that it is multi-site safe
• MDL-50661 - Restyle "Clean" theme to use Logo and Header in Frontpage with smaller logo option in other pages.
• MDL-36652 - When downloading an Excel spreadsheet of student logs, have the course short name included in the file name.
• MDL-53207 - Display stock avatar instead of own user picture from messages from fake users
• MDL-52781 - ??? Improve core_user::fill_properties_cache()
• MDL-51698 - Markup the crumb trail so search engines understand it and leverage it
• MDL-53072 - Option to choose whether we include suspended users when auto-creating groups
• MDL-52869 - Convert inline activity name edit to use the inplace editable element

For administrators

• MDL-26935 - New capability to control role renaming
• MDL-28030 - Add config.php settings to allow plugins to rewrite output moodle_urls (eg clean / semantic urls)
• MDL-52752 - Administrators can specify an alternate URL to use for MathJax
• MDL-52219 - Completion tracking & availability should default to on for new installs
• MDL-52990 - Enable all emails to be themed, ie add 4 wrapper mustache templates
• MDL-53260 - Option to display CLI upgrade messages in English
• MDL-52386 - Allow to control field for flagging enabled/disabled users in LDAP authentication (useful for Active Directory)
• MDL-52383 - Calendar "Days to look ahead" should allow intervals up to 1 year
• MDL-49934 - Admins or managers should be able to retrieve assignments info via get_assignments web service

Security issues

There are no security issues included in this release, please refer to Moodle 3.0.4 release notes

For developers

• MDL-53451 - Competencies support in Moodle (documentation)
• MDL-52954 - file_storage class can now convert between office documents (documentation)
• MDL-30811 - Introduce notification stack to moodle sessions (documentation)
• MDL-49279, MDL-50032 - Allow external functions to add themselves into services
• MDL-51802 - Reusable element for inplace editing (documentation)
• MDL-50887 - Antivirus: Implement plugins infrastructure for antivirus and create ClamAV plugin.
• MDL-52237 - Add a callback to inject nodes in the user profile navigation
• MDL-50464 - New renderer for RSS Client Block allows themes to customise its look
• MDL-50851 - Significant changes to Tags API, tag areas can now implement callbacks to display tagged items (documentation)
• MDL-53274 - Throw exception (in developer mode) if page context is not set, otherwise it is not noticeable in AJAX calls
• MDL-52826, MDL-52715 - Allow to use moodleforms in AJAX requests (documentation)
• MDL-52013 - Allow mod_assign plugins to add calendar events
• MDL-51718 - Allow to specify scheme in moodle_url
• MDL-51700 - Ajax service should clean the return values of the external functions
• MDL-46891 - Upgrade to behat 3.x (documentation)
• MDL-48362 - Improve the enrol API to prevent logic in the UI (documentation)
• MDL-51324 - New course chooser element for moodleforms (documentation)
• MDL-52996 - Allow Atto customisation for special-purpose plugins
• MDL-53311 - Changes to navigation tree structure (documentation)

For full list of deprecations refer to lib/upgrade.txt and upgrade.txt files in the folder where the particular plugin is located. Here are the most major deprecations:

• MDL-53962 - Changes to webservices XML-RPC API - it is now critical to specify parameters for XML-RPC calls in the correct order. Previously Zend may have been able to work out the order, our new implementation, at this stage, cannot.
• MDL-49414 - Remove deprecated web services
• MDL-48621 - Deprecate the old events system
• MDL-52207 - Delete Zend framework

See also

• Moodle 3.0 release notes