Moodle 1.5 (to be released shortly)

Headline features

• 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

Other Major System-wide Improvements

Admin

• 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
• New version of Moodle MySQL Admin module (available separately)
• New calendar options page provides user interface to configure the behavior of the calendar

Authentication

• 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

Files

• 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)

Filters

• 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: <span lang="en"></span>
• 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.

Themes

• Modules can provide standard styles
• Themes can override required styles of other themes
• Users and courses can choose their own themes if the admin allows it
• Implementation of tabs interface on many pages

HTML Editor

• 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)

Course management

• 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.

New blocks

• 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

Calendar

• 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

Activity Module Improvements

Assignment

• Completely refactored into a new class-based design, allowing new plugin-assignment types
• New Online Text assignment type that doesn't require files and allows inline comments when grading - this new type effectively replaces the old Journal module
• Vastly improved grading interface for handling large classes
• New configuration options to disable late submission and to e-mail alerts to teachers when students submit new work

Chat

• Streamlined interface looks smoother, works faster, even without using the optional server daemon
• Blocks can now be added to chat pages (e.g. for additional information)

Choice

• Rewritten to allow any number of choices
• The number of users per choice can be limited, which allows it to be used as tool for "signing up" to an array of options.
• You can now download the results of the choice to XLS or a TXT file

Forum

• Powerful new Google-like forum searching tools
• Forum read/unread tracking - unread messages are highlighted on the course page, forum page, discussion listing and the discussion view
• The tracking system may be disabled by teachers/users
• User profiles show all posts by a user, as well as all discussions
• When admins edit user messages, a notice is attached
• Discussion listing shows the last user who posted to each discussion and when it was, with a direct link to that post
• In group-enabled forums the discussion listing shows the group the thread applies to, with a link to the group description page.

Glossary

• New setting to enable/disable the print view of each glossary.
• New search system looks for words everywhere (instead of doing exact phrase match).
• More information is sent to logs to be able to track activity better.

Journal

Lesson

• Now supports timed Lessons
• Can create practice Lessons (grades are not stored)
• Option for students to view points earned while taking the Lesson
• Allow students to review their answers before submitting the Lesson
• New Slide Show Mode (only branch tables are displayed as slides)
• New Left Menu (for enabled branch tables only)
• Lessons can now be Password Protected
• A Tree View can be used for the Lesson creation screen
• Students can post their high scores
• New option to save a Lesson's settings as defaults for new lessons in the same course
• Can delete a student's attempts
• New page Jumps:
  • Previous Page
  • Unseen question within a branch
  • Random question within a branch
  • Unseen question within a cluster
• Added functionality to view Lesson statistics
• New question type: Essay. Teachers can view each essay and write comments, assign a grade, and then email it all to the student
• New question creation interface

Quiz

• Can handle adaptive questions, i.e., questions that allow the student to interact with them repeatedly within the same quiz attempt and that can change in response to student answers.
• Student can be allowed to try a question again immediately within the same quiz attempt until they get the answer right.
• There is a penalty mechanism that deducts a specified fraction of the mark for each wrong attempt at a question.
• Allows questions rendered and scored externally (e.g., by mathematical assessment engines) to be integrated seamlessly into Moodle quizzes via the RQP web services protocol.
• Is prepared for the handling of IMS QTI questions once web services for these become available.
• New tabbed teacher interface for previewing, editing, and reviewing quizzes.
• New "improved security" mode shows quiz in a separate full-screen window, with many browser features disabled
• Quizzes can be presented to students in several pages. The number of questions per page is selectable by the teacher.
• Blocks can now be added to quiz pages (to show results table, or additional information etc)
• Better and cleaner interface for question selection and management in the database. Selected questions can be added to quiz, moved to other categories or deleted en mass.
• When a question is edited that is already in use the teacher can choose in which quizzes to replace the exising version with the new one.
• If a question is edited that already has student responses, these responses and a copy of the original version of the question are kept for auditing purposes.
• When a teacher makes changes to a quiz that already has student attempts these attempts are automatically remarked.
• Random questions are now added to the quiz question list with a dedicated button, leaving a cleaner interface at questions database without phantom placeholders
• Final grade can be a fractional number, with teacher-defined decimal figures
• Improved results page with user-selectable display of columns, cleaner sorting and new mark display options
• Questions can be edited with one click from the improved quiz preview and question preview screens.
• Questions can be copied with one click, to allow question variations to be created with ease.
• Revamped question categories structures and editing interface.
• Categories now can contain nested subcategories and can be re-ordered.
• It is possible to select whether questions from categories, and or their subcategories are displayed on the question edit page.
• It is now possible to select whether to add random questions from a parent category alone, or from a parent category and its sub-categories.
• Quiz creators are prevented from changing the question set of quizes that have had student responses.
• Recognition, and rejection, of overlapping/redundant questions has been improved.
• The display of questions in longer quiz categories on the quiz editing page is now paginated.
• New export types - IMS QTI (2.0) and xhtml. Improvements & fixes to others.
• New import type - Hot Potato. Improvements & fixes to others.

Scorm

• Improvements to user result data storage and reporting. Now Moodle SCORM module supports AICC standard

Survey

Wiki

• Changes to wiki pages are now monitored and displayed in Recent Activity block
• Several under the hood improvements to backup/restore and other routines that enhance the reliability of wikis