Moodle News

Google sponsors twelve new Moodle developers

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:02:37 WST

by Helen Foster.

Congratulations and welcome to our twelve Google Summer of Code 2008 students, who will be working on Moodle projects over the next 3-4 months.

We chose the following students and projects:

Andrei Băutu - XMLDB/SQLite
Sarveswaran Kengatharaiyer - Competency tracking
David Knight - Automatic accessibility checking
Grady Laksmono - Moodle IDE
Laia Subirats Maté - Detecting and solving specific usability issues
Avi Mehta - Web 2.0 language editing interface
Joey Morwick - Blog improvements
Luis Rodrigues - Messaging improvements
Askar Salimbaev - Secure RSS feeds
Daniel Servos - Animated grade statistics report
Akshit Sharma - New customisable theme
Chris Zubak-Skees - Feed aggregation library

For further details about the projects, see the GSOC/2008 page in Moodle Docs.

Please give our new Moodle developers help and encouragement wherever you can!

Google Summer of Code 2008 gets under way!

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:24:56 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

We are very glad to be involved in Google's Summer of Code for our third year in 2008. Previous years have resulted in lots of interesting new code (some of which is in 1.9 or will be in 2.0).

At the moment we are just gathering new mentors and students. See our student projects page for suggested ideas for projects and join in the discussions in the student projects forum!

Moodle 1.9 is now available!

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:23:36 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

After the longest beta-testing period in our history (over 5 months) including a successful Bugathon and nearly a year after Moodle 1.8, I am very glad to announce that Moodle 1.9 is now ready for use!

Major new features include:

An all-new Gradebook designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems (sponsored by Open University).
Integrated support for Outcomes, so that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities, and can be graded against (Moodle.com)
A huge increase in performance due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code. Large sites especially will see major speed increases. Special thanks to Catalyst in particular for their scalability work on the core Roles functions. (Catalyst Pty Ltd, Moodle.com etc)
Tagging is now a core function allowing us to easily link things like users, blogs, courses etc as well as external sites like Flickr and Youtube through the use of simple tags. (Google SOC and Moodle.com)

and much much more, including hundreds of bug fixes and tweaks.

See the Release notes for full details and as usual, get your fresh copy of Moodle via your local CVS mirror or the (currently very busy!) Moodle download server.

Thanks to everybody in the Moodle community (and their families!) for supporting this complex project in a myriad of ways. It's just getting better and better, and I'm still having as much fun working with you all as the day I started.

Cheers and let's get working on Moodle 2.0 (ok, wait until tomorrow )

Martin
Moodle Founder and Lead Developer

Bugathon prize winners

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 04:56:08 WST

by Helen Foster.

As announced in the developer meeting yesterday, the Moodle bugathon prize winners are as follows:

Most bugs resolved

Dan Poltawski
Gary Anderson
David Mudrak

runners-up: Petr Kalis, Mike Churchward, Eric Merrill and Michael Spall

Most fixes verified

Nicolas Martignoni
Séverin Terrier

Most duplicates identified

Dan Poltawski
David Mudrak
Wen Hao Chuang

Most new bugs filed

Matt Gibson
Dan Poltawski
Wen Hao Chuang

Prizes consisted of cash, iPods and a choice of any item from the Moodle Shop.

Congratulations to all our prize winners and a big thank you to everyone who took part in the bugathon. It has certainly helped make Moodle 1.9 a very stable release!

(Edited by Michael Blake - original submission Saturday, 1 March 2008, 04:59 AM)

Bugathon and GHOP contest updates

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:16:54 WST

by Helen Foster.

Just to update you on the two contests that have been running in the last couple of months:

Moodle Bugathon

The Moodle bugathon ends in less than three weeks on Tuesday, 12th February 2008. However, if you're quick, there is still time to enter and win a prize (cash, iPods and/or item from the Moodle Shop).

Everyone is welcome to participate - not just developers! Please check the various contest categories:

A big thank you for all the bugathon work done to-date - it's really helping Moodle 1.9 to become our best ever release!

GHOP contest

The Google Highly Open Participation contest for Moodle has proved to be extremely popular, with students completing around 100 tasks since the start of the contest. Completed tasks include video tutorials, language pack improvements, Moodle presentations, custom themes and lots of documentation contributions - see GHOP/2008 for a list.

A big thank you all contest participants, and to everyone who has helped in reviewing tasks and suggesting new ones.

Work on claimed tasks will stop on Monday 4th February 2008. We'll then choose the winner of the grand prize - an all-expenses-paid trip to Google's Mountain View, California Headquarters!

New mail server

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:06:50 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

Just a technical note: I've moved the moodle.org email processing to a separate server that can better cope with the huge volumes of posts everyone is generating in the forums on this site.

From the mail logs I can see some new bounces from people who need to whitelist mail.moodle.org in their configurations, so if you just stopped getting email from us, that's why.

Look for more improvements to moodle.org coming soon.

A new face on moodle.org

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:32:51 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

Well, if not a new face then a new picture anyway!

Many of you will know Helen Foster as an active, long-time participant on this site and "Steward" of the Moodle Documentation. Most of us will have seen her cat picture around the forums and the docs, patiently and efficiently helping people get the information they need. She's also a joint author (with Jason Cole) of the new edition of the Using Moodle book.

What you may not know is how much Helen does behind the scenes, helping to maintain the moodle.org sites (this one, docs, tracker and download sites) and diplomatically prodding those of us who need constant reminders to make some of those "important but not urgent" things actually happen.

Most of this has been as a volunteer in the past few years, but I'm really happy to announce that the Moodle Trust is now able to employ Helen full time as our "Community Manager" to work on maintaining, improving and directing all the Moodle community web sites and activities (eg things like regular Developer meetings).

Please give her your support and help her out where you can!

Google HOP contest encourages pre-University students to work on Moodle

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:47:33 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

After their very successful Summer of Code program for University students, Google just announced their new Highly Open Participation contest, designed to encourage pre-University students to get involved with open source projects via much smaller and diverse contributions.

I'm very proud that Moodle has been selected as one of only ten open source projects to take part in the inaugural year of this new contest.

We have a long list of small tasks prepared already for students, but we would definitely like to see the Moodle community come up with more - so if you have any ideas for things you want to see done, please send them to us! Just remember they can't take more than five days.

Google will pay students US$100 for every three tasks they successfully complete, plus send a cool T-shirt. There are also grand prizes including an all-expenses-paid trip to Google HQ in Mountain View, California. If you are (or know) a young student with an interest in Moodle then give it a go!

You can find out all the details on the Moodle/GHOP contest site.

Moodle Bugathon!

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 16:58:29 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

Some people are wondering: "Where is Moodle 1.9"?

Well, it's still being polished in order to make it as good as possible. One of the things I really want to avoid is a repeat of our Moodle 1.7 release which was (in retrospect) a little rushed - the implementation of Roles caught a lot of people by surprise.

So in the name of stability and clarity and consistency and all those good things, we are having a Moodle Bugathon. Some seriously nice prizes are available to developers who fix the most bugs, test the most bugs, file the most bugs, or even just identify the most duplicate bug reports in the Moodle Tracker!

All developers and testers are welcome, even if you've been lurking until now. Join in the bug stomp, and let's make 1.9 the new 1.6.

Full details are here: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Bugathon

Nominate Moodle for Packt's Open Source CMS award

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:16:27 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

If you believe Moodle should win this award, please nominate us:

http://www.packtpub.com/article/nominate-overall-open-source-cms-winner

Even though Moodle is technically not a content management system Packt assures me that we qualify.

In other news Moodle 1.9 is coming along well and we should have a Beta release very soon!

New full-time developer needed at Moodle HQ

Wed, 16 May 2007 13:21:08 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

We are looking for a new PHP developer to work with us full-time on location here at Moodle HQ in Perth, Western Australia.

If you know someone who might be interested, or who might know someone who might be interested please let them know!

Strong PHP skills and good web design are definitely required to succeed in this role. You will need a high degree of self-motivation but will have the support of a knowledgeable team in Perth as well as a fun international developer community. A solid understanding of Moodle architecture will be viewed favourably.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Write high quality PHP code conforming to Moodle guidelines
Unit testing
Reviewing peer code
Investigate and resolve bugs
Participate in planning and design sessions (online and offline)
Escalate issues when appropriate

ESSENTIAL SKILLS

Min 3 years experience working in a development environment
Relevant tertiary qualifications or equivalent commercial experience
Ability to operate with minimal supervision
Ability to complete tasks to deadline
Ability to work as a member of a team
Good communication

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Very strong PHP programming skills
Good knowledge of XHTML Strict 1.0 and CSS
Good knowledge of MySQL and/or PostgreSQL
Good knowledge of Linux system administration
Familiarity with using the UNIX shell
Javascript and AJAX experience would help

Interested? Please send your resumé with cover letter to jobs@moodle.com !

moodle.org could be having some hardware problems

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:18:31 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

This server has been having some unusual problems causing it to lock up every now and then. The loads have been high (lots of visitors!) but I don't think that's the whole issue here.

We'll be bringing it down for maintenance sometime later today (so it will be unavailable for a while).

Moodle CVS down for anonymous users

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 12:36:14 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

Unfortunately our anonymous CVS service (at Sourceforge) is currently down, which may impact administrators using CVS to maintain their Moodle sites. (Development access is unaffected).

Sourceforge have told us they switched it off due to very high loads on that server - this may be due to our growing number of users but it may just be a rampant process somewhere. We're still working it out with them.

In the meantime we're working on a CVS mirror just in case the Sourceforge service doesn't come back up.

For full details and updates, you can watch MDLSITE-182 in the Moodle Tracker.

Moodle takes on ten new developers from Google SOC 2007

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:57:19 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

I'm very happy to announce that we will again be participating in the Google Summer of Code Program (an annual event where Google pays students to work for three months on open source projects mentored by established developers).

We had 83 applicants for 10 projects! The projects cover a number of features and improvements that have been much requested by segments of the Moodle user community.

For full information about the projects, see the Student projects page in Moodle Docs.

Moodle wins multiple awards from the eLearning Guild!

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 10:01:13 WST

by Martin Dougiamas.

The eLearning Guild has just released their Guild Research 360^o Report on Learning Management Systems, based on a survey of 930 e-Learning professionals representing 840 different organizations world-wide.

The survey covers market share and satisfaction ratings in various key sectors using LMS products.

Moodle took out three Platinum awards (top award) and one Gold award (runner-up).

Education and Government Learning Management Systems:

Satisfaction

Market Share

Small and Medium Corporate Learning Management Systems:

Satisfaction

Market Share

For more details, see the eLearning Guild press release.

Now's a good opportunity to thank our worldwide Moodle community of teachers, students, researchers, developers and other participants who help make the Moodle project what it is.

We also want to thank our Moodle Partners and the clients of our commercial services who contribute to the funding of our core team of developers and keep the software Free. If you need Moodle hosting, Moodle training or any other Moodle services, please use an official Moodle Partner company (you can find them listed on moodle.com).