Hi all!
I thought it was time to crawl out of my cave and post a little update here on how things are going with Moodle 2.0.
All of us working on Moodle 2.0 core are still plugging away hard on development. We're responding to all the feedback from people helping to test the series of Moodle 2.0 Preview Releases we've been doing (eg see the notes for Preview Release 4), and fixing hundreds of bugs and rough edges in the new features.
(I'd also like to announce that we are launching our first formal cycle of functional QA testing today, which is a great milestone for us. See Helen's recent post in Testing and QA forum and the QA testing page in the docs for details.)
If all goes well, it's looking like we should be able to hit a usable and feature-complete state for Moodle 2.0 in a couple of weeks, around July 20. You can follow the the main blockers in the tracker to see progress towards this. Unfortunately, I don't think we can call that a final release yet, because the testing period for much of it has not been long enough, so at this point we'll call it Moodle 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1).
This code will still not be a recommended upgrade for all sites, but if you are an experienced Moodle admin able to dive into PHP if required, and you urgently require the Moodle 2 features, and you find it works well enough for your particular use of Moodle, then the risk will be manageable. The APIs and Database will be completely frozen and most issues should be relatively cosmetic.
Testing and polishing will continue for probably another month or two, focusing on consistency, correctness and performance. This will also be a great window for developers to update their contributed plugins, as we'll be improving the documentation for core APIs with more examples of best practice for the new Moodle 2 platform.
Thanks for your patience everyone! We are getting close!
Cheers,
Martin (Founder and Lead Developer)