Moodle 2.0.3 Gets 230 Fixes and Improvements
Moodle 2.0.3 has been released, incorporating more than 200 new features, improvements, bug fixes, and security tweaks (some of them classified as major).
Moodle is a widely adopted open source learning management system that supports both small and large deployments (with several sites well beyond 100,000 users) and includes course management tools, various Web 2.0 technologies, online assessments, integration with plagiarism detection tools, integration with repositories and electronic portfolio software, and other features common to learning management systems. It's used by about 1.12 million teachers and more than 42 million users via 54,000 sites worldwide. Those users participate in some 4.5 million total courses as of this writing. (Current statistics can be found here.)
The new 2.0.3 release gets bug fixes to four major and one minor security vulnerability, among them a cross-site scripting issue and two bugs allowing invalid records to be added to the database. It also includes a wide range of fixes to multimedia support, including:
- Flash player customization in course themes;
- MP3 playback with the latest Flash versions;
- Support for HTML5 video if the browser supports it;
- Video resizing; and
- A YouTube accessibility issue.
It's also incorporated usability enhancements like a new flickr.com portfolio plugin, enhancements to themes (including a new theme called Nimble), superscript rendering, and external linking to Alfresco repositories.
Most of the other fixes and enhancements were more minor.
An update has also been released in the Moodle 1.9 branch, version 1.9.12. That update is far less extensive than the 2.0.3 update, incorporating 16 bug fixes and two improvements, including support for adding iframes in course category descriptions.
Moodle 2.0.3 and Moodle 1.9.12 are both available now as free downloads from the Moodle site. Further details on the 2.0.3 update can be found here. Details on the 1.9.12 update can be found here. Direct downloads are available here.