Moodle in English

Cold numbers:

11 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 27 delayed - 73% success.

Notes:

• It's another minor release in 10 days (8th March 2021). Time flies!
• 104 issues awaiting peer review. Let's bring this number down in the coming weeks!
• We'd appreciate any help (peer reviews, mainly) with the issues related to preparing Moodle for PHP 8.0. Please check out the epic: MDL-70745.

Hot topics:

• MDL-52817 - GROUP_CONCAT() support
• MDL-70038 - Faster PDF to PNG conversion
• MDL-70828 - Allow session lock debugging to be switched off

Warm thanks:

• To Moodle HQ's Tamara Smith and Moodle HQ Perth's Office Relocation Committee (PORC🐷) team, for their tireless efforts in making sure that HQ people who want to work from an office will always have a nice place to work from! Thanks heaps!

Cold numbers:

16 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 25 delayed. That’s 94.12% success.

Notes:

• This month's developer meeting was held on Tuesday, February 16, 2021. If you were unable to attend, the recording is available at https://moodle.org/mod/bigbluebuttonbn/view.php?id=8596.
• There are 100 issues awaiting peer review. Make peer reviews, not war.

Hot topics:

• MDL-69562 getremoteconfaddr cannot be set to HTTP_CLIENT_IP, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, REMOTE_ADDR
• MDL-70536my_reset_page_for_all_users should be a cli script
• MDL-47410 Add behat support for selecting a date from one of our date elements
• MDL-64554 Add module for displaying moodleform in a modal window
• And lots more in areas like H5P, administration, groups, content bank, ...

Warm thanks

A big thank you to all the active members of the Moodle Dev Chat, always willing to help in a selfless way, both those who share their difficulties and those who help to overcome them.

Cold numbers:

24 issues have been successfully integrated with 8 rejected and 15 delayed. That's 75% success! Not too bad! 💃

Notes:

• Remember Developer meeting will happen next Tuesday 16 February 2021 at 19:00 UTC (Check this time in your location). There you'll know the latest #moodledev news and Koen Roggemans, Moodle translation coordinator awarded with the Moodle 3.8 dedication, will talk about "Translating Moodle" 🏆
• Do you know that course renders are being rewritten to use templates? If you want to know more about this will work (you might be interested if you have your own course formats), you should follow: MDL-65974 ✏️
• Currently, there are 84 issues waiting for peer-review. If you have some time and want to help to reduce the queue and add some nice features to 3.11, you'll be more than welcome 📉

Hot topics:

• MDL-70631: Improve performance of zip_packer::extract_to_pathname()
• MDL-70429: Allow admins to set the default returntype in repository_contentbank
• MDL-69898: Config change event should link to config change report
• MDL-51287: Show confirmation when profile changes are saved
• MDL-70796: Moodle word count does not match other software
• MDL-70627: aarch64 mimetex type support for filter tex
• And lots more in areas like quiz, assignments, accessibility...

Warm thanks:

• To all the Women and Girls in Science, because today is our day, to recognize the critical role we play in science and technology 👧🏋️‍♀️👵

Cold numbers:

34 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 22 delayed. That's 87% success and some progress to start reducing the integration queue! 💪

Notes:

• A new version of moodle-plugin-ci has been released (v3.0.5). ⚠️You might need to add an extra line to GitHub Actions workflow to make it use the nvm versions correctly). More information can be found in the Changelog and also in issue #80. 
• Have you seen the roadmap for Moodle 3.11? It has been updated recently and includes several interesting features. Can't wait to see them! 👀
• Reminder for developers: before sending issues to review, some explanation about what has been done exactly should be included and the description should fit with the patch. If you take some minutes while working on a patch to add some extra information to explain what and why you've tackled this approach (especially for improvements and new features), it will save time to the reviewers (and, for instance, will help the integration team to reduce the queue... so it's clearly a win2win). Apart from writing a comment in the issue (which is great), is also recommended to organise the git history on an easy way to follow and add some comments in each commit (unless it's a simple commit and the summary is self-explanatory).✏️
  
• Next Developer meeting will be Tuesday 16 February 2021 at 19:00 UTC (Check this time in your location). You can't miss it if you want to learn more about Moodle translating.📢

Hot topics:

• MDL-70632: Allow searching of available language packs
• MDL-67959: The default group icon should not be displayed when there is no group picture
• MDL-58673: Enable playback rates for videojs
• MDL-66769: Create a task to clean up unused H5P content
• MDL-70439: User email address setting is displayed on your own profile
• MDL-66932: Grade percentage display in Gradebook should be LTR, in RTL mode
• And lots more in areas like library upgrades, activity chooser, IMS-CP, deprecations, accessibility...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDL-69936 the policy to decide what to do with print_error() and lang strings on moodle_exception, is going to need some more love. Eloy is analysing the current status of lang strings. Keep tuned and read the summary he is preparing (once he posts it).
  

Warm thanks:

• To Andrew Nichols for a lot of reasons (he is always willing to help)... But maybe this week he deserves it more than ever because we can now run behat tests with W3C drivers thanks to his hard work! 😘

Cold numbers:

8 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 31 delayed. That’s 66.67% success.

Notes:

• moodle-plugin-ci new 3.0.4 release (with updated tools, GitHub Actions documentation and support for W3C webdrivers). Refer to changelog for more details: https://github.com/moodlehq/moodle-plugin-ci/releases/tag/3.0.4
• There are 81 issues awaiting peer review. Don't be shy, pick one up.

Hot topics:

This week there is one issue that requires most of our attention:

• MDL-66979: Switch all the behat testing to the new W3C drivers:
  • Read carefully this forum post, Changes to Behat in Moodle.
  • Supported by moodle-plugin-ci, see the note above.
  • More documentation coming soon.
  • Additional documentation about the changes that you may require is at https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Behat_Driver_Update.
  • Check the Moodle dev chat announcement (Telegram).

One at a time
This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDL-69936: print_error() + lang strings on moodle_exception. Although it was proposed last week, we would like to get more feedback before making a decision. At the moment, using moodle_exception and removing print_error at some point seems the preferred way to go. Do you agree?

Warm thanks:

24th January was the International Day of Education. Warmest thanks to all those who work for quality, inclusive and equitable education and lifelong opportunities for all, such as Save the Children does.

Cold numbers

23 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 26 delayed - 88% success.

Notes

• This week saw the release of minor versions 3.5.16, 3.8.7, 3.9.4 and 3.10.1. Check out the releases page to see the release notes for each respective version.

Hot topics

• MDL-69333 - The security checks report now includes checks for public paths
  
• MDL-70438 - It's now possible to see where content is linked in the content bank
• MDL-57020 - Unused grading scales can now be successfully removed
  
• Great to see lots of library upgrades landing this week too
  

One at a time

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

We'd love some opinions on what to do with the print_error() function, see here for the policy issue:
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-69936

Warm thanks

To Sir Timothy Berners-Lee. Thank you kindly for providing us all with an exciting place to learn, explore, work and play.

Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch

Cold numbers:

33 issues have been successfully integrated with 8 rejected and 39 delayed. That's 80% success and big progress (bugs have been prioritised to get them integrated for the minors), although the integration queue is still quite huge! 😅

Notes:

• Next Monday 18th January, Moodle 3.5.16, 3.8.7, 3.9.4 and 3.10.1 minors will be released. Check the latest bug fixes and security issues into the release notes and be prepared to enjoy upgrading your sites 😉
  
• Requirements for Moodle 3.11 are ready! 🎊These are the agreed changes that will be applied to Moodle 3.11 and up:
  • PHP 7.3 (or later) will be required.
  • Moodle 3.6 (or later) will be needed to upgrade.
  • No changes in DB requirements but SQL*Server 2017 (or later) will be required.
  • The sodium extension will be required.
• The amazing W3C drivers for behat are coming. More information can be found in MDL-66979. Let's play! 💻
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-70580: Privacy export tree navigation non-functional
• MDL-70558: Available language packs unsorted, difficult to locate
• MDL-70408: Open H5P file from H5P activity when it was added as a reference
• MDL-70362: Add showdebugging and showsql options to admin/cli/uninstall_plugins.php
• MDL-70352: Modal forms stay on the screen if you have multiple modals on one page
• MDL-70009: Course with H5P element in content bank can not be deleted by Manager/Teacher role (with appropriate rights)
• MDL-69877: Set up a security.txt file in Moodle LMS
• MDL-70387: New Web Service core_files_get_unused_draft_itemid
• And lots more in areas like library upgrades, accessibility...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDL-69308 the policy to decide Moodle 3.11 requirements, had an agreement and, in fact, it was integrated last week. Check the issue to know the agreed requirements.
  

Warm thanks:

• All the people that have contributed, identifying, fixing, testing or promoting, to getting WCAG 2.1 AA Accessibility compliance for Moodle 3.9 and 3.10. It's great to see how our beloved LMS maximises inclusion and education for all users! 😍

Cold numbers:

8 issues have been successfully integrated, 0 rejected and 53 delayed - 100% success. Not so bad given the limited integration manpower this week!

Notes:

• It's now just over a week before the next minor releases (18th January 2021)!
• 75 issues awaiting peer review. Let's start the year with a bang by thinning this list!

Hot topics:

• MDL-70584 - Prevent upgrade from resetting the last run time of scheduled tasks
• MDL-68792 - Allow fake blocks to be displayed on the embedded layout

Warm thanks:

• To the Moodle community for all of the support to Moodle through all the years! Looking forward to your continued support from 2021 and beyond!🙇‍♂️

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 45 delayed. That's almost 95% success (although, as you can see, the integration queue is still quite big)! 😅

Notes:

• GitHub actions update. Have you heard that now you can start using them for your plugins too? You'll find more information in In https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Github_actions_integration#Moodle_plugins Some plugins, such as moodle-filter_embedquestion and moodle-plagiarism_urkund, are them 💃
• Codechecker 3.0.0 (stable) was released two weeks ago and master was merged with phpcs3 branch. Next step: review moodle-plugin-ci to start using this new version of PHPCS3 😉
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-68533: Allow mod_assign download all assignments to be streamed
• MDL-68481: mod/folder/download_folder.php should be a streaming zip download
• MDL-70397: Browser opens and closes before first test
• And lots more in areas like deprecations, libraries, accessibility...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDL-69308 deadline for submissions finished and a summary with the requirements for Moodle 3.11 (database, PHP, Moodle, extensions) was published yesterday and is waiting for votes. Check the requirements proposal and share your concerns or votes. Hurry up! You only have the next 2 working days.
  

Warm thanks:

• To the family, because they are always there, taking care of us. Please, enjoy with them as much as you can 😘

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• Whether you are an experienced developer or just taking your first steps in Moodle, the Moodle Plugin Development Basics course is worth a visit. Don't miss it.
• In the master upgrade.php files you will not see the Moodle 3.10.0 upgrade line. In short (see MDL-70146 for details):
  "...when under parallel development, this only can be done in the stable (310_STABLE) branch, master already has diverged and can have own upgrade steps not corresponding to the version just released, but to the future version being developed in parallel."
  
• There are 81 issues awaiting peer review. A Christmas peer review marathon?

Hot topics:

• MDL-65818 Security: Provide admin setting type for secure data (passwords/tokens).
• MDL-69869 Get suspended users enrolled in a course via Web Services.
• And lots more in areas performance, usabilitiy, accesibility, libraries, ...

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers: 16 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 22 delayed - 88% success.

Notes:
- There are still a number of issues in the integration queue, so please be patient if you're waiting for an issue to be looked at. Over the xmas period, we expect leave to reduce the overall team availability.
- Don't forget your github actions can be set up per the docs here: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Github_actions_integration

Hot topics:
MDL-70157 AWS Aurora support for stable branches
MDL-57614 Fixed JS warning when adding blocks on sites with large number of blocks
MDL-70267 Course user profile page layout corrected

One at a time:
This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

MDL-69308, for deciding Moodle 3.11 requirements, is the next one to be proposed for voting, if you've any suggestion or comment, now it's the time for them! Due date was Monday 30th November, so expect an outcome here soon.


Warm thanks:
To Claude Vervoort, for his continuing support of the LTI specifications in Moodle. Many thanks, Claude!

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with  5 rejected and 15 delayed. That's 78% success! It's not as good as last weeks, but it's not too bad, no?

Notes:

• As Eloy mentioned last week, recently Travis changed their plans/pricing structure. A couple of issues landed this week in order to help to mitigate these changes:
  
  
  • MDL-70265 will reduce the minutes to 1/3 because, by default, only the lowest PHP version and PGSQL will be run. However:
    • database can be changed to mysqli or all via env
    • PHP can be changed to all (via env)
    
    The documentation page, https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Travis_integration, has been updated accordingly to explain all these changes.
    
    
  • MDL-70276 has added support to GitHub Actions. This is the very first version and, for now, it runs grunt and 2 phpunit tasks, minimum and maximum PHP supported versions on every branch, each one with different database (mysql and postgres).
    As you'll see if you have GitHub actions enabled, a new badge will appear in your tracker issues, near each branch, with a link to the task.
    
    All the needed information about how it works and what you need to do to use it should be now available: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Github_actions_integration

Hot topics:

• MDL-69773: Add an option to display section names in the Section link block
• MDL-42382: Add a "Replace filter" option on the browse users page
• And lots more in areas like deprecations, behat, libraries...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-2804, about  PHPDoc file/class policy cleanup, has been updated and closed with the final decision. Yeah!!
• MDL-69308, for deciding Moodle 3.11 requirements, is the next one to be proposed for voting, if you've any suggestion or comment, now it's the time for them! Due date is next Monday 30th November so please, add your suggestions/comments about existing comments before it.

Warm thanks:

• To Community sites team, because they have been working harder than usual (which seemed impossible!) to upgrade AMOS and to add some nice features. Thank you for your work on this amazing tool that let us translate Moodle easily to our preferred language. 😘

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 14 delayed. That's 100% success, second week in a row... uhm... that deserves a verification!

Notes:

• Last week, Code checker 3.0.0beta was released in the Plugins directory. It comes with the latest CodeSniffer release (3.5.8), our "moodle" ruleset and Sniffs converted to new 3.x ones, plus all the tests and utilities working apparently ok.
  • Anybody wanting to try it, pick it from the link above or switch to the "phpcs3" branch via git.
  • Since its release, it's being used by CiBoT and the Tracker reports, working without problems. If you find any glitch / bug, please keep us informed using GH issues.
  • Soon, the 3.0.0 final version will be released (in the master branch) and we'll be spreading it over tools (CiBoT, moodle-plugin-ci) ASAP.
• As you may know, recently Travis changed their plans / pricing structure and the change has become in effect already. Basically it means that all the previous "Free" (Open Source) plans now get a number of credits and, once the credits are spent (they are basically processing time) you must ask them for more credits or start paying. Some points:
  • First of all, I want to say "Big thanks! to Travis for all the resources that they have been giving to us for free over all these years, incredible!
  • But, also, I think that we must find reliable alternatives (plural) to Travis, because it affects every-single Moodle repo we work with, and to everybody, Moodle HQ or no, core or plugin. And we shouldn't be subject to "surprises" like this (less than one month ago we were moving all the stuff from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com without knowing that this was going to be announced and applied so quickly).
  • In order to keep things working and to provide some good replacements for current travis-dependent stuff, some initiatives are already ongoing:
    1. Moodle HQ (and all their repos) are already using a paid Travis plan. That way all the pushes and pull requests to all our repos will continue being covered by current Travis CI checks.
    2. We are reducing the number of tests (saving minutes, aka credits) run by default in core. You can find some more information and details @ MDL-70265.
    3. Also for core, we have an initial version using GitHub Actions, and it's working acceptably well. That integration is specially interesting because it's free for public repos and integrates automatically for all the developers having their clones @ github. See MDL-70276 for more info (and an example of the new badges that soon we'll see in all issues). Of course it doesn't cover people using other git facilities, we are happy to add support for more, just share your ones in the issue.
    4. Something similar / parallel is happening with all the non-core repositories, we'll be gradually adding support for GH Actions to all them (codechecker, moodlecheck, local_ci, moodle-docker...)
    5. Special mention to moodle-plugin-ci, there you will find a number of issues related with the change (see #47, #48 and some other issues). The basic idea is to make/keep moodle-plugin-ci being CI agnostic so it can be used by a variété of systems, say travis, github actions, your local computer... or system X. That doesn't deny specific developments that can be done for better integration, but without putting on risk the functionality as a standalone product.
    6. Ideally, all the initiatives above, mainly focussed on GitHub Actions (that is a really cool CI approach) won't be the last and we'll be able to provide other, alternative, CI integrations, both for core and plugins.
    7. Finally, we don't have any immediate plan to remove any current Travis integration, so it should continue working exactly the same for everybody already into a paid plan (or planning to move to it). Simply, it has become "one more CI tool", from its previous "the main CI tool" role (for Moodle). Just that.

Hot topics:

• If all the above doesn't sound hot for you, I can respect it, but please, look to the list of issues yourself!

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-2804 : This is due and decided, but haven't had time to process it yet, will try this week.
• MDL-69308: Moodle 3.11 requirements is the next one to be proposed for voting, if you've any suggestion or comment, now it's the time for them!

Warm thanks:

• To the Holidays, cannot wait for next ones.

After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps
not so much to be resting yourself, as to see
all the other fellows busy working.
-- Kenneth Grahame

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 7 delayed. That's 100% success, perfection exists!

Notes:

• The on-sync period has ended. Normally it lasts a couple of weeks, but with within the parallel development cycles we are immersed in, branches (310 and master) are already diverged, so there isn't much to keep on-sync.
• All the new features and improvements that were put on hold after freeze (14 issues) have been unheld and we'll be processing them over the next weeks, please be patient. All them assumed to be for Moodle 3.11 (May 2021), unless explicitly targeting Moodle 4.0 (Nov 2021).
• The MOODLE_311_STABLE branch is already available everywhere (git repositories, tracker, tools...) and, despite its name, it's a development branch. So together with master, we are back into a parallel development period (until May 2021) and here there are some particularities / rules coming with the parallel stuff:
  • Starting with Moodle 3.10 (already released) all branches are now 3-digits instead of old 2-digits. So 3.10 is 310, 3.11 is 311, 4.0 => 400, 4.1 => 401... and so on.
  • The versions in the parallel branches cannot overlap. So, 310 is already sticky to release date (20201109), 311 will get versions (and upgrade steps) using current dates (like master used to)... but that implies that all those dates are "reserved", hence master has been already bumped to 20210525 (2 weeks after the 3.11 release), and we must apply for last-digit increments only in that branch (until the parallel development period ends, with the release of 3.11).
  • All the stuff integrated to 311 must be integrated also to master.
  • upgrade.txt notes will point always to the first development branch getting the change, being documented with that very same version in all the development branches.
  • Over the next weeks, we'll be automatically porting stuff between the 2 branches, but after a point (to be decided) it will be required to provide patches for both branches.
• January 11th minor released have been postponed by one week and will be released on January 18th.
• It's time to discuss and agree about next Moodle 3.11 requirements, everybody is welcome to propose anything @ MDL-69308. Once all options are there, they will be voted and enter in effect ASAP.

Hot topics:

• Nothing special, all good issues, thanks for your help!

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-2804 : That goes one step further (related with the previous one), about what to do with the current duality of file and class phpdoc blocks in those 1-artifact (class, interface, trait...) files. It's already within the voting period and we should be able to have a decision about it soon.

Warm thanks:

• To Georg Cantor (Continuum hypothesis / CH), because it makes you think about how some obvious things (not necessarily in Maths) cannot be neither demonstrated neither refuted. They just are, accept them.

The continuum is that which is divisible into indivisibles that are infinitely divisible.
-- Aristotle

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 13 in the queues. That's 90% success, good one!

Notes:

• Over the last 4 weeks, since the Moodle 3.10 continuous period started, 110 issues have been accepted.
• In few days, Moodle 3.10 beta will be rolled, aiming to be feature-complete really, really soon. No new improvements or new features unrelated with the release will be accepted until after the on-sync period.
• As you surely know, the Moodle 3.10 QA testing is happening this weeks, and needs to be finished before release. Any help there is absolutely welcome, specially with tests labelled "test_server_required" that require real servers and integrations that many of you could have around.
• Special mention to the update to PHPUnit 8.5, please spend some time understanding the required changes and adapting your tests to it. Note that many of the changes are not mandatory now (they are only "deprecated" in PHPUnit 8 and will continue working), but all them will be removed in PHPUnit 9, leading to errors. So, the recommendation is to move away from the warnings/deprecations ASAP (at least that's what we have done in core) .

Hot topics:

• Nothing special, all good issues, thanks for your help!

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6216 : Has been agreed and the modifications have been applied.
• MDLSITE-2804 : That goes one step further (related with the previous one), about what to do with the current duality of file and class phpdoc blocks in those 1-artifact (class, interface, trait...usually autoloaded) files. You are welcome to read the rationale and proposal there and comment about it. After some good discussion an "official" proposal will be redacted and voted.

Warm thanks:

• Today, 23rd of October, around 06:02 PM, to the chemists, yay constants! (N_A)

I guess chemistry is just another word for love.
-- Scott Thompson

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• On Monday, September 29, the continuous integration period begins with more weekly releases (Tuesday and Friday) and fewer email communications. Please, remember to keep your branches updated.
• And what comes next? You're right. We only have a week left to the code freeze.
  
• Moodlemoot UK & Ireland 2020 will take place online from September 28-30. Enjoy all participants! I'll follow #MootIEUK20 the whole week.
• There are 58 issues awaiting peer review. Happy reviewing!

Hot topics:

• MDL-69667 Competencies count always 0 in competency frameworks.
• MDL-66587 Scrolling quiz timer.
• MDL-69454 Use a consistent search input field across all Moodle searches.
• MDL-66934 LTI: support substitution parameter for course history
• And lots more in areas like user management, administration, course, language, ...

One at a time

• MDLSITE-6216: Clarify class declaration docs. It is now more specific and ready to be voted on. Most of the work has been done on other issues, but the documentation has yet to be properly updated.

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers:

11 issues have been successfully integrated with 8 rejected and 2 delayed. That's only 58% success, some weeks we can be pernickety Don't get discouraged!

Notes:

• The countdown has started, just 2 weeks for next code freeze and 5 more weeks (totalling 7, yes) for Moodle 3.10 release (9th November 2020).
• There are 58 issues awaiting peer review right now. Let's try to go under 25 before code freeze!
• Travis has announced that they will be closing travis-ci.org by the end of 2020. So it's a good moment to start migrating all your repositories to travis-ci.com. We are already working on that for our repos and associated tools and checks.

Hot topics:

• MDL-42012 : CACHE_DISABLE_ALL now allows to continue using cache data sources.
• MDL-69630 : Social course format now allow to use the activity chooser.
• MDL-69664 : Fixed bug displaying external tool badges.
• MDL-69730 : Better time availability towards better metrics.
• And lots more in areas like accessibility, H5P, installation, web services...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6216 : Clarify class declaration docs. We are still agreeing about the scope of the policy issue and hopefully will be able to propose something to be voted soon.

Warm thanks:

• To the Imagination, that allows us to think, question, solve, create, foresee, dream and feel about the unknown. What a wonderful tool. Please, imagine, a little bit, every day!

Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!
-- Dr. Seuss

Cold numbers:

23 issues have been successfully integrated with  4 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 85% success! 💃

Notes:

• Next Monday 14th September, Moodle 3.5.14, 3.7.8, 3.8.5 and 3.9.2 minors will be released. Check the latest bug fixes and security issues into the release notes and be prepared to enjoy upgrading your sites 😉
• Attention: the road to PHPUnit 8.x has started! Some of the changes coming with PHPUnit 8.x are incompatible between old versions of PHPUnit, PHP and Moodle so some people will need to branch or "sacrifice" old testing branches. More information will be added to the tracker issue so stay tuned. 👾
  
• This week has landed one more issue related to the Moodle parallel development to support 3.10 and master dev branches: MDL-69521. All comments in code pointing to 4.0 have been replaced to 3.10 (and same for 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4). 😊
• There are 58 issues awaiting peer review. Remember we have a goal to achieve before Halloween!! Please, help us to get this number lower!! 💪
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-28501: Allow to open files in mod_folder without downloading
  
• MDL-69645: Preferences window can be opened on Safe Exam Browser Mac clients during quizzes using manual configuration
• MDL-69525: Toggle-all checkbox publishes multiple events with inconsistent data
• MDL-69448: Course Copy in 3.9 and 3.9.1 not working for a teacher with extended permissions
• MDL-68344: File Picker: focus lost on upload
• And lots more in areas like accessibility, unit tests, deprecation...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-5972, the policy to decide whether to require type hints and return type declarations has been agreed and is now in effect. The documentation will be updated soon, to adapt the examples to the required way.
• MDLSITE-6216 is the next issue to vote. Thank you Dan for raising this issue for clarifying class declaration docs. Feel free to vote and comment.

Warm thanks:

• To all students around the world, because they are the future and are doing a great job dealing amazingly with this exceptional situation.

Cold numbers:

31 issues have been successfully integrated with  4 rejected and 10 delayed. That's 88% success! Wow!

Notes:

• In 1 week we'll be releasing the next minors (3.5.14, 3.7.8, 3.8.5 and 3.9.2), including the latest bug fixes and security issues. Monday, September 14th. 💪
  
• The workshop for developers "Developing a basic content-bank plugin" designed for Global MoodleMoot Online 2020 to learn how the content bank works and how to implement new content type plugins is available for everybody as a course in moodle.org.
• There are 48 issues awaiting peer review. What good reviewers!! You've done an amazing job because, finally, the number is under 50. Do you think we can get them down to 25 before Halloween? Let's keep playing, please! 👏
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-69269: Download content from the content bank
  
• MDL-69270: Replace content file from content bank
• MDL-69174: Embedded H5P-activity grades are not saved
• MDL-69112: Underscore in folder name breaks assign feedback multi-upload
• MDL-67419: Set language in user profile during account auto-creation based on browser language instead of admin setting
• MDL-67278: Use autocomplete widget for course category selector
• MDL-55971: Dataformat - Store to filearea support
• MDL-55340: Export labels from feedback
• MDL-38350: PHP Warning when purging all caches: race condition?
• MDL-33981: Equella repository does not support copying at all, and so won't work for forum attachments, assignments etc
• And lots more in areas like forms library, accessibility, behat, language...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-5972, to decide whether to require type hints and return type declarations, is still waiting for votes... For now, requiring them is wining but there is still time to vote
  

Warm thanks:

• To the UX team (Àlvar, Barbara, Candice and Hina) because they're always willing to help and have been preparing and running several workshops with users to make Moodle even better. You'll find information about who they are and which projects are they working right now to Moodle 4.0 road in the Moodle User Experience (UX) course.

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated with  3 rejected and 28 delayed. That's 83% success!

Notes:

• Since last week there are 2 development branches, MOODLE_310_STABLE and master. These development branches are also required for improvements/new features (except for issues that should only land in Moodle 4.0). For now, there will be an interim period allowing missing 310_STABLE branches in issues but it would be great (and will help the iTeam), start adding them too 😉
• In backup/restore, avoid using floatval() casting and use always version_compare(). More information in this commit. 😊
• There are 57 issues awaiting peer review. Keep doing a great job trying to reduce them as much as possible! 💪

Hot topics:

• MDL-69464: Option to allow HTML in the page headings (skip applying format_string)
  
• MDL-69358: The 'backup_cleanup_task' task deletes records related to incompleted ad-hoc tasks
• MDL-69307: Add CLI script to restore a course from a backup file
• MDL-67211: Tasks: Show information about running tasks, allow tasks to be disabled
• MDL-66810: Allow microphone and camera to be accessed from content iframe
• MDL-66222: Add admin options for how to handle detected viruses
• MDL-69479: LOW: Change all the 4.0 upgrade.txt notes to 3.10
• And lots more in areas like analytics, accessibility, H5P...
  

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDL-67415, the policy to decide Moodle 3.10 requirements, had an agreement and, in fact, it was integrated last week. Check the issue to know the agreed requirements.
• MDLSITE-5972 will let us decide whether to require type hints and return type declarations. It will be waiting for your votes and comments until next Friday 4 September 2020.

Warm thanks:

• To DevCamp MootDACH2020 organisers and participants. It was amazing to see what can be achieved in 48 hours!!! Congrats to the winners! 👏👏👏

Cold numbers:

34 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 21 delayed. That's 97% success, (almost) perfection exists!

Notes:

• This week has been the first one already working with MOODLE_310_STABLE, actively integrating and testing issues and, ultimately, rolling all the changes upstream (moodle.git).
• Remember that MOODLE_310_STABLE is a development branch, that will become stable in November 2020, with the release of Moodle 3.10. Then, MOODLE_311_STABLE will be created (branching from 3.10), also being a development branch, and becoming stable in May 2021, with the release of Moodle 3.11.
• Together with the 2 branches above, in parallel, and incorporating all the stuff from them, master will be getting all the expected features needed for the Moodle 4.0 release (November 2021).
• So, at all effects, we are already under a parallel development period, right now with 310 and master already diverged and each one following their own path to release. Here there are some particularities / rules coming with the parallel stuff:
  • All branches from now on (> 39) will be 3-digits instead of current 2-digits. So 3.10 is 310, 3.11 will be 311, 4.0 => 400, 4.1 => 401... and so on.
  • The versions in the parallel branches cannot overlap. So, 310 will get versions (and upgrade steps) using current dates (like master used to)... but that implies that all those dates are "reserved", hence master has been already bumped to 20210525 (2 weeks after the 3.11 release), and we must apply for last-digit increments only in that branch (until the parallel development period ends, with the release of 3.11).
  • All the stuff integrated to 310 (and 311) must be integrated also to master.
  • upgrade.txt notes will point always to the initial version getting the change, being documented with that version in all the development branches.
  • Over the next weeks, we'll be automatically porting stuff between the 2 branches, but after a point (to be decided) it will be required to provide fixes for both branches.
• While various tools have been already updated (Tracker, CI tools, basic checks...) to support the parallel development, there are a lot more to get verified and modified. You can see how all the changes to those related tools are being performed in the Parallel development epic.

Hot topics:

• MDL-69273 : Fixed a recent regression causing travis to pass phpunit failed builds..
• MDL-68683 : Fixed DML exception on upgrade when cleaning up old competencies stuff.
• MDL-61215 : Support SVG image in user profiles and badges.
• And lots more in areas like installation, content banks, dashboard, course...

Warm thanks:

• To the trees, with their branches and leaves, so green, so fresh. Life, as we known it, wouldn't be the same without you, thanks!

If you're not a tree hugger, then you're a what, a tree hater?
-- Douglas Coupland

Cold numbers:

29 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 24 delayed. A 94% success rate this week - an improvement on the past few weeks.

Notes:

• Following the announcement last week that 3.10 requirements have been agreed upon, the following apply:
  • The MOODLE_310_STABLE branch has been created;
  • All issues previously identified as being fixed in, or affecting 4.0 have been rewritten as 3.10;
  • All issues previously identified as affecting 4.1 have been rewritten as 3.11; and
  • Moodle 3.10 branch details have been added in the tracker. We encourage you to create 3.10 branches for all issues.
• There are 48 issues awaiting peer review. The queue is gradually coming down but I'm sure that we can continue to reduce it further.

Hot topics:

• MDL-68731: Sending of Forum digests should respect the "Mark posts as read" preference;
• MDL-68729: Allow Solr server queries and indexing to be split to different servers;
• MDL-69241: Pagination is now reset on the participants page when applying fitlers;
• MDL-69168: Custom icons for LTI activities are now shown in the recently accessed items block;
• And many more across Moodle.

Warm thanks:

To all of the developers out there performing plugin reviews, especially those over the past few months.

Cold numbers:

16 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 35 delayed. That's 89% success, good one!

Notes:

• Moodle 3.10 requirements have been agreed. Only changes will be:
  • Moodle 3.10.x will get PHP 8.0 support along its life, given it's possible and doesn't imply huge changes.
  • MySQL min requirement bumps to 5.7.
  • PostgreSQL min requirement bumps to 9.6
• Internet Explorer 11 support has been decided:
  • Moodle 3.9.x (LTS) will be the last branch actively supporting IE11. People really needing to use IE11 longer will have to stay sticky to that branch, that will be actively maintained (security / data loss / privacy wise) until May 2023.
  • Moodle 3.10.x (to be released in November 2020) will be the the first branch actively not supporting IE11. Meaning that all the compatibility bits will be removed and IE11 will stop working in all the places where those compatibility bits were needed.
• This week Moodle 3.10 (MOODLE_310_STABLE) experiments are being performed @ integration.git, aiming to detect all the impeding changes needed to support it properly (testing and releasing) in order to get it added officially ASAP (ideally, the August 17th week). Stay tuned!

• There are 52 issues awaiting peer review. What about going down to only 3 dozens by the end of August?

Hot topics:

• MDL-40227 : Fixed a problem with decimals in lesson's numerical questions.
• MDL-69336 : Fixed collapsing columns in dynamic tables.
• MDL-67687 : Added support to verify accessibility compliance (WCAG A, AA and others) from within Behat tests.
• MDL-69207 : Added H5P library files caching.
• And lots more in areas like forums, accessibility, user management, performance, themes...

Warm thanks:

• To all the explorers, past, present and future. Adventurers of the Unknown, discoverers of the World. All them, any field. Thanks!

I am prepared to go anywhere, provided it be forward.
-- David Livingstone

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• Keep up to date with the latest code changes: subscribe and read the posts in this forum, check the notes in the upgrade.txt files and take a look at the release notes after each new version.
• There are 54 issues awaiting peer review. Code reviewers don't miss a beat!

Hot topics:

• MDL-63252 XMLDB check defaults return false warnings, no more false warnings on integer values.
• MDL-69079 Activity chooser does not display errors if module fetching fails, to overcome nasty disposal of the modules.
• MDL-68390 WCAG 4.1.2: aria-hidden elements contain focusable elements, we are very committed to improving accessibility.
• MDL-65923 Add a new event when a grade item has been deleted, be aware when a grade item is deleted.
• And lots more in areas like administration, course, choice, forum, ...

One at a time

• MDL-67415: Moodle 3.10 will be the next one. Check the requirements proposal and share your concerns or votes. Hurry up! You only have the next 2-3 working days.

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• The long-expected moodle-plugin-ci 3.0.0 has been released! There were some significant changes. Please refer to the Changelog, the upgrade guide and the docs for details. Don't forget that Travis has to be on top of it (local_codechecker example). Special thanks to Ruslan for the effort over the last weeks. \o/
• 56 issues awaiting peer review. Well done peer reviewers! That's a significant decrease!

Hot topics:

• MDL-68874 Have an optional sql debug mode which instruments sql with the calling php code, let's make it easier to struggle with queries.
• MDL-48391 tool_uploadcourse should check if enrolment method can be disabled/deleted, one step forward to allow no admin users to upload courses.
• MDL-65819 Contact request email must respect the receiver's language, to avoid learning new languages before accepting contact requests.
• MDL-68178 Confirmation e-mail is not resend by e-mail self registration, for those who always lost the first activation e-mail.
• And lots more in areas like behat tests, assignment, gradebook, global search, analytics, course...

Warm thanks:

Thanks to the moodlers around the globe, especially the Events team (Diego Fabra and Anastasia Polomoshnova), the #MootGlobal20 Online Team and all the speakers, too many to mention here, who made the latest MoodleMoot Global Online an invaluable experience!

Cold numbers:

16 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 13 delayed. That's 84% success, well done!!

Notes:

• There are 80 issues awaiting peer review. Let's remove this "8" number from there 💪
  
• There are still some available spots for the Moodle 4.0 UX Workshops! Are you in the list of people who are going to hear how amazing it is or do you prefer to enjoy it live? 😜
• Our Learn Moodle 3.9 basics MOOC is open for sign-ups. It will start on 5 October 2020 😉
• If you are using mod_hvp in your site and you're planning to move the existing activities to the new mod_h5pactivity, included in Moodle3.9, you might be interested in this migration tool developed by Moodle HQ.
• Next developer meeting will happen Tuesday 18 August. If you want to share something with the community, please don't hesitate and contact us! 

Hot topics:

• MDL-45002: New quiz completion option: At least one (or N) attempt completed
• MDL-69068: Allow behat generators to be pivoted
• MDL-69215: load_fontawesome_icon_map web service does not respect current theme
• MDL-45849: new enrol/self:enrolself capability
• And lots more in areas like behat tests, accessibility, deprecations, performance, ...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6130, the policy for requiring new JS modules to be written in ES6, has agreed and is now in effect. The documentation will be updated soon, to adapt the examples to the required way.
  
• MDL-67415, is the next issue chosen to be voted. It will help to decide Moodle 3.10 requirements (database, PHP, Moodle, drop IE11 support). Proposals and comments will be more than welcomed from now until next Friday 24 July 2020 so don't hesitate and share your thought
  

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers:

28 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 8 delayed. That's 93% success, wow one!

Notes:

• Commented last week, the new moodlehq/moodle-plugin-ci repository is already available, just changing it in the .travis.yml files of your plugins should keep everything working 100% the same and ready for next versions (being discussed at #9). There are some small details to adjust and changes to apply but the transition is almost done. Any problem, suggestion, fix... let's use the issues and pull requests of the repository.
• 16700 is the number of issues that have been integrated since we debuted the Moodle development process in 2011. Why is this number so special? It isn't, but 20000 is around the corner!
• At the time of reading this, July's Moodle versions 3.5.13, 3.7.7, 3.8.4 and 3.9.1 will be already released. Next station, September 14th.
• There are 81 issues awaiting peer review. What if we get down to 50 before (Northern) summer holidays?

Hot topics:

• MDL-60827 : Oauth2 now observes the "Require email verification" setting.
• MDL-69104 : Drag and drop question now working ok on mobile (3.9 regression).
• MDL-69109 : Theme icons now aren't lost after upgrades. This one discovered a good number of issues related with icon systems.
• MDL-56041 : Better handling of 404 and 50x custom pages.
• And lots more in areas like behat tests, deprecations, performance, logging, libraries...

Warm thanks:

• To all the Moodle Moots around the globe, physical or online. For helping us to realise that all this certainly has some sense and what an awesome group of people is out there!

I believe that education is all about
being excited about something. Seeing passion
and enthusiasm helps push an educational message.
-- Steve Irwin

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 12 delayed. That's 75% success, not bad for new features and improvements!

Notes:

The first week after the 3.9 continuous period has been really intense, with everybody planning, discussing, deciding about a number of things, all them happening together. Here there are a couple, surely of your interest:

• After some unsuccessful attempts of alternative collaboration schemas, Moodle HQ is going to maintain a fork of moodle-plugin-ci.
  It has been a great tool for the whole developers community (thanks to MoodleRooms/Blackboard and, very particularly, to Mark Nielsen, for all the hard work there over the last years) and, for sure, has a brilliant future with everybody's collaboration.
  So, the decision is taken and, the most important detail has been already voted, and it will be named moodlehq/moodle-plugin-ci . Seriously, for more details, see MDLSITE-6102. Expect the new repository and package to become alive along the very next days.
• Announced last Friday, Moodle 3.10 (Nov 2020) and Moodle 3.11 (May 2021) will be the next two major releases, before Moodle 4.0 (Nov 2021). As many of you may have already realised, that comes some direct changes to the status-quo (development-wise), here there are two, just to go warming up:
  1. It means that we'll have two development branches in Moodle, both evolving together. One side, a dev. branch for 4.0 where all the big changes will happen and then, another dev. branch for the 3.x series where other contributions will be accepted. Of course, both branches will have to receive all the bug and security fixes along their whole life.
     This parallel development comes with some implications, for example, we have to ensure that there won't be any overlapping of versions in the 2 branches, to guarantee that all the upgrade paths are ok.
     We also will need to get used to provide patches for both branches, knowing that chances of them not being direct cherry-picks (growing conflict probability) will increment while the branches diverge more and more.
  2. The implicit (and historic) assumption of branch numbers being always 2 digits is changing. Simply there isn't enough room in 2 digits to store 3.10 or 3.11, neither to guarantee that 4.0 will be "bigger than" (after) them. So, expect branch numbers to change (310, 311, 400...) and, related, expect branch names to change too.
     And this is really an important and impacting change. Because it will require modifications in a good number of tools, integrations, core... where the "2 digit" assumption was used in any logic of flow. They can go from just a tiny tweak (modify a regular expression, ...) to keep things working to complex and deep updates in some processes and tools. Be warned!
• To document, discuss, organise and split all the above into smaller and processable chunks, MDLSITE-6201 has been just created. Expect it to evolve quickly over the next days.
• Of course, your input and help in the points above (and everywhere else) is welcome, always! Fun and exciting months coming!

Hot topics:

• MDL-58931 : Support AWS Aurora (mysql) databases.
• MDL-60583 : Performance improvement querying huge external_tokes tables.
• MDL-69072 : Sessions are now reset between Behat scenarios.
• MDL-58926 : Keep quiz timer on sync with server time modifications.
• And lots more in areas usability, deprecations, privacy, themes, H5P, competencies...

Warm thanks:

• To Mathew May, from the Moodle LMS team, for being awarded with the "most helpful team member" recognition for the 3.9 release. Great work, and well deserved!

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment.
which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
-- Horace Mann

Cold numbers:

9 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 82% success, good one!

Notes:

• This roll implies that the continuous integration period has ended, we are back to normal (weekly) releases and the 3.9 branch and master have already diverged. It has been a phenomenal continuous period with everybody detecting, proposing, fixing, reviewing, testing... towards a really cool Moodle 3.9 release. Thanks all for your help and support!
• Because of the above, all the new features and improvements that were stopped over the previous weeks have been already un-held and their integration process will start in hours. Right now there are 30 issues awaiting, please, be patient. Sure that all them find their route to upstream.
• In a couple of weeks (July 13th) the next minor/security versions will be released. Let's try to fix as much as possible till then.
• Over the next weeks we'll be intensively working on the deprecations for next version. See the MDL-62608 Epic for more information (requires sign-in). Also, in parallel, we are looking for all the needed library updates for the next version. See the MDL-68836 Epic for more information (requires sign-in). That's the place to discuss/propose anything about them.

Hot topics:

• MDL-69021 : Improve the visibility of links in alerts / notifications.
• MDL-68841 : Fix activity chooser responsiveness on size changes.
• MDL-68992 : Reconcile the minimal age of digital consent with current legislations.
• And lots more in areas like accessibility, behat tests, content banks...

Warm thanks:

• To Paul Holden, from the Moodle Workplace team, for all his support, attention to the detail and, always, great mood. Many, many thanks!

Continuity does not rule out fresh approaches to fresh situations.
-- Dean Rusk

Cold numbers:

10 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 9 delayed. That's 100% success! 👏

Notes:

• After 7 intense weeks, with 318 issues successfully integrated and Moodle 3.9 released, we are back to normal. It's time for celebrations, retrospectives and, of course, to continue planning and preparing the next Moodle version. Stay tuned!
• This is a good time to look at your pending dev docs and complete them for helping everybody else.
  
• Over the next weeks will be working on every 3.9 regression detected, towards Moodle 3.9.1 release in July 2020.
  
• There are 95 issues awaiting peer review. Please, help us to reduce this number and push all those issues to integration!! Will we manage to reduce it to 0 someday? 
  
• If you missed last dev meeting this Tuesday 16 June, where Brendan shared his knowledge in caching and performance and Sander explained latest Moodle news, remember you'll find the recording here.

Hot topics:

• MDL-69049: Moodle 3.9 upgrade fails due to missing column in privacy plugins if standalone GDPR plugins were used
• MDL-68971: The error message when a web service can't be found totally unhelpful
• MDL-68436: Atto recordrtc (record audio/video) plugin only works in the first editor on a page
• MDL-66899: Regrading quiz attempts should be logged

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6087, known as "Require formal namespaces for new files", has been agreed and is now in effect. From now, formal namespaces are required for any new classes in Moodle (except when it doesn't support them). The coding style page will be upgraded soon with the newly agreed rules.
  
• MDLSITE-6130 is the next policy issue proposed, about requiring new JS modules to be written in ES6. Please, vote your preference to decide whether ES6 should be required or not.

Warm thanks:

• All educators around the world!! 😘

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• The release date for Moodle 3.9 has been officially moved to the 15th June 2020. Let's make 3.9 awesome! 
• Please, remember to avoid initiating $PAGE in generators code. MDL-68645 was integrated and, although it's not a perfect solution, mod/block/repositories are now covered. Some contrib plugins unit tests may start failing for 3.9
  
• There are 76 issues awaiting peer review. If you have time and are willing to help, you're very welcome to grab several of them! 😜

Hot topics:

• MDL-19711 : Split read and write DB operations.
• MDL-68177 : Course renderer UI elements split into different methods
• MDL-67810 : Integrate content bank and H5P content creator
• MDL-67547 : Render HTML in PDF dataformat export
• MDL-45184 : Licenses: Create user interface to add/delete new licenses
• And lots more in areas like Questions, H5P, Performance...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6087 is waiting for comments because it will be closed for the count soon. Remember to vote your preference to decide whether namespaces should be required or not.

Warm thanks:

• All the people helping with the Quality Assurance (QA) tests. Thanks a lot for your time, patience, enthusiasm and effort! 😘

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• 79 issues awaiting peer review. There is always room for improvement 😜

Hot topics:

• MDL-68294: Add a new "Mobile app subscription plan" section in the Moodle app settings.
  
• MDL-68493: Create a new view type list in the Content Bank.
  
• MDL-66992: Add support to Open Badges 2.1.
  
• MDL-67700: Messages mix-up fixed.
• MDL-67812: Create a new repository for the content bank.
• And lots more in areas like H5P, Questions, Performance...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6087, currently namespaces are not required for any new code and there is no requirement to move non-namespaced classes to namespaces. The aim of this proposal is to make namespaces required in new Moodle classes, as well as to define usage rules and deprecate the use of pseudo-namespace prefix on class names.

Warm thanks:

• To Helen Foster, who always has been right there, helping out wherever and whenever in every release. These days, immersed in the Moodle 3.9 QA testing cycle, your hard work is even more noticeable. We couldn't do it without you!

Cold numbers:

10 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected, 22 in progress and 73 in the queues. That's 91% success! 💃

Notes:

• As MDL-66109 landed this week, you will need to bump your node installation (nvm-controlled or no) up to v14.0.0. Otherwise, our grunt “reconstructions” will lead to incorrect results that later CI jobs will detect. The following command should do the trick: nvm install && nvm use. And, to keep it the new default: nvm alias default 14.
  
• The Moodle .39 Quality Assurance (QA) testing is here again. A T-shirt will be sent to the top 10 community QA testers. Will you be one of them?
• Yesterday, May 11th, the minors 3.5.12, 3.6.10, 3.7.6 and 3.8.3 were released as expected. Let's play to upgrade
  
• The integration queue is still quite long. We're doing our best during this continuous integration period but it might take longer than we would like to process all the issues. Apologies for the delay and thank you for your understanding! Checking and rebasing your issues periodically will help us
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-66109: Bump nodejs from lts/carbon to stable (>=v14.0.0)
  
• MDL-65547: Enable login into the mobile app via QR in the web user profile
  
• MDL-68041: New theme settings for secure layout - display lang menu and display logged-in user
  
• MDL-68571: Upgrade from 3.5 -> 3.9 fails on upgradesettings page
  
• MDL-68276: Standard log entries can be manipulated
  
• MDL-68271: H5P editor: support content-type translations
  
• And lots more in areas like H5P, PHPUnit tests, libraries...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6105, to decide @link and @see tags usage, has been agreed easily and is now in effect. A couple of TODOs will be done during the next minutes/hours/days in order to help to apply it 😉
• MDLSITE-5873, about coding style for trailing comma in multi-line arrays in PHP and JS, is the new policy issue waiting for your comments and votes. Speak now or forever hold your peace 😜

Warm thanks:

• All the mothers in the world. Because they deserve it 😘😘😘😘😘😘

Cold numbers:

37 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 100 in the queues. That's 88% success, slightly above average!

Notes:

• Since Monday, April 27th, we are already within the continuous integration period, aiming to roll stuff upstream often. That implies that a bit extra of responsiveness is really welcome from everybody when an issue is being processed.
• If you are guessing when Moodle 3.9 code freeze is... well, it's "today" (Monday, May 4th), more exactly @ 11:00 UTC. Tick, tock, tick... and, yes, just 5 weeks to Moodle 3.9 release, fun times!
• Also, in 1 week we'll be releasing the next minors (3.5.12, 3.6.10, 3.7.6 and 3.8.3), including the latest bug fixes and security issues. Monday, May 11th.
• Worth commenting that, after a long process, it seems that we are close to, officially, support PHP 7.4 (both for 3.8.3+ and 3.9). There may be some well hidden details here and there but, overall, all tests are passing and all the seek & destroy changes required have been processed.

Hot topics:

• MDL-65967 : Show missing links to recycle bin in Boost.
• MDL-67915 : Regression in TCPDF lib may lead to deleted images in some modules (confirmed with mod_certificate).
• MDL-67850 : quizaccesss_seb integrated into core.
• MDL-68445 : Bump to Behat 3.6.1
• MDL-68329 : Improved cache performance visualisation on footer (funnily, it caused a small - but acceptable - performance regression, ).
• And lots more in areas like themes, H5P, JS charts, Behat tests, administration, forms library...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

• MDLSITE-6096, also known as "One external function per class and per file under component\external namespace" has been finally agreed and is now in effect. Note that doesn't imply that we need to "convert/move" all current external functions from the "old" externallib.php to the new, namespaced location under classes and there may be cases where it makes sense, for consistency to continue using the old location (this applies to all policy issues in general). Still, for new cases... the new rules must be always considered.
• MDLSITE-6105 is the next policy issue proposed, about how to use the @link and @see tags in PHPDocs. Hopefully it won't be much controversial, logic sense (developers around?) should apply.
• Finally, and about the voting system for those policy issues, note that, from now on, ⅔ (two thirds) will be required to accept any change. That implies that any issue facing ⅓ (one third) or more opposition won’t be accepted (unless clarified, amended and voted again, ideally in another issue). Towards clear, consistent, conservative and non-controversial agreements.

Warm thanks:

• To the NINE number. Because I want.

A stitch in time...

Cold numbers:

12 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 48 delayed - 75% success.

Notes:

• The integration queue is quite long at the moment. Hopefully, this will improve over the coming weeks. Apologies for the delay and thank you for your understanding!
• Barely more than 1 week to go before the Moodle 3.9 LTS code freeze: Monday, 4th of May!
• 69 issues awaiting peer review. Better than last week! Let's keep this pace up!

Hot topics:

• MDL-67886 - Check indexes with admin/cli/check_database_schema.php
• MDL-58018 - Reduce session lock contention with opt-in READ_ONLY_SESSION
• MDL-66920 - Option for LTI 1.3 tools to use Keyset URL for public keys
• PHP 7.4 compatibility fixes
  • MDL-67317 - Behat/mink PHP 7.4 fixes
  • MDL-68339 - Fix invalid array operation usage on objects

Warm thanks:

• To Bas Brands for his tireless efforts and help to HQs various projects. Well done!

Stay safe, everyone!

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 37 delayed. That's 95% success, wow one!

Notes:

• As you can see above, we have a good pile of issues delayed, we are trying hard to get it back to acceptable levels, our apologies for that!
• It's just 2 weeks for Moodle 3.9 LTS code freeze: Monday, 4th of May.
• Also, in 3 weeks we'll be releasing the next minors (3.5.12, 3.6.10, 3.7.6 and 3.8.3), including the latest bug fixes and security issues. Monday, 11th of May.
• There are, right now, 76 issues awaiting peer-review. Let's try to progress as many of them as possible, specially if we want to have them applied to the imminent releases.

Hot topics:

• MDL-67814 : H5P Editor integration.
• MDL-67663 : Forum grading accessibility.
• MDL-67751 : List folders in course resources.
• MDL-68288 : table_sql to support dynamic pagination.
• And lots more in areas like accessibility, H5P, Javascript, Behat tests...

One at a time:

This (non-regular) section in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way.

A final deadline (April 21 00:00 UTC) has been set for MDLSITE-6096. Please, read the 2 proposals there and vote them. Next week we should be able to share the final outcome(s) of that issue and propose a new one.

Warm thanks:

• To Davo Smith, from Synergy Learning, for all the great contributions in the plugins area and his continuous involvement helping Moodle and the Community. Many thanks!

Don't get stuck in old ideas. Keep recognizing that reality
is changing and that your ideas have to change.
--- Grace Lee Boggs

Cold numbers

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and  40 delayed. That's 83% success rate this week!

Notes

• The number of issues awaiting peer-review is growing: 73!!! 😱 Any help here will be welcomed! 
  
• Moodle 3.9 LTS code freeze is coming... only 3 weeks! 🤪

Hot topics

• MDL-68185: Convert performance report to Check API
  
• MDL-68233: Code in renderers should not refer to global $PAGE or global $OUTPUT
  
• MDL-47271: Add system status report including tasks with CLI status script
  
• MDL-67995: Single activity format dropdown from types of activity empty
  
• And lots more in areas like participants, badges, accessibility...
  

One at a time

• We're still deciding which is the best way to proceed with the current policy issue MDLSITE-6096: One webservice per class. Some interesting comments have been raised there and we're waiting for your opinion to make a final decision! 
  

Remember you can find all the policies issues reviewed in the "One at a time" section in the following epic: MDLSITE-6092

Warm thanks

• To Neill Magil, from the University of Nottingham. Thanks for helping everywhere: developing good patches, improving accessibility, peer-reviewing a lot of issues... You rock!! 👏

Cold numbers

22 issues have been successfully integrated with 7 rejected and  30 delayed. That's 75% success rate this week!

Notes

• Have you ever heard about the "ready_for_integration" label? It can be used for devs missing "pull-request" permissions to indicate that an issue is, after their review, ready. It has been added to the "Tracker issue labels" doc page. You can use this filter is to check which issues have that label. Important: the correct label is "ready_for_integration" (to match every other label). For now, we've kept in the filter the old using "-" just in case somebody reintroduces it
  
• There are still 64 issues awaiting peer-review ... Will this number be under 50 any day?
  
• MDL-45227 landed this week. It includes some RTL improvements to Atto but, for now, it has been only applied to master. In order to consider to backport it to stables safely (3.7 and 3.8), we would like to ask you to test it intensively: different operating systems, browsers, languages... TIA!
• Four weeks for Moodle 3.9 LTS code freeze : Monday, 4th of May.
• This week we've started the "Moodle Party Daily ONLINE", a 30 minutes session open to all Moodlers around the world. You'll find more information here.

Hot topics

• MDL-45227: Add text direction to default ATTO generated markup
  
• MDL-67734: Create basic skeleton for a global xAPI library
  
• MDL-64494: Contrast of colours for success, info, error and warnings text is not accessible
  
• MDL-68116: Prepare Moodle to be ready when h5p.org down completely so that only the author can see the test content
  
• MDL-58964: Add existing class attributes to Boost flat navigation nodes
  
• MDL-67995: Single activity format dropdown from types of activity empty
  
• MDL-52319: Failed environment.xml check does not prevent plugin from being installed
  
• And lots more in areas like questions, LTI, H5P, accessibility...
  

One at a time

• This week we have achieved an agreement about MDLSITE-5667 (Coding style ruling about function/method return types and nullables), matching the PSR-12:

1) No whitespace between the nullable character (question mark -?) and params or return types.

2) No whitespace between the function closing brackets and the colon.

With an image speaking a thousand words. Correct:

          public function foo(string $bar, ?int $baz): ?bool {}

(you can find the complete version already @ Moodle Docs / Coding style)

• For the next week, we would like to propose the following issue, granting you the opportunity of commenting there over the next 4 days: MDLSITE-6096: One webservice per class. We'll be waiting for your comments there!

Remember you can find all the policies issues reviewed in the "One at a time" section in the following epic: MDLSITE-6092

Warm thanks

• To Nadav Kavalerchik, Shamim Rezaie and all the people helping to make Moodle more RTL languages friendly 😘
  

Cold numbers

16 issues have been successfully integrated, with 2 rejected and 18 delayed. That is a 89% success rate for this week. Great work, everyone.

Notes

The long-waiting peer review queue is slowly coming down. Let's keep up the great work and try to keep this down below 50!

Hot topics

MDL-67442 - Assignment comments now expanding properly on Safari.
MDL-58413 - The URL activity now support internationalised domain names.
MDL-67934 - Quiz now suggests default id numbers when duplicating questions.

Warm thanks

To John Beedell of The Open University UK, for 13 years of contributions to Moodle alongside plugin development and general contributions to the wider community.


"Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future" - Nelson Mandela

Cold numbers

13 issues have been successfully integrated, with 7 rejected and 17 delayed. That is a 65% success rate for this week.

Notes

• Due to a lot of activity here in Moodle HQ with moving everyone home for work, we are experiencing delays with reviews. Please bear with us as we readjust.
• Some dates have shifted such as the code freeze (4th May 2020). Please read the roadmap for further details.
  

Hot topics

• MDL-67707: Create a new H5P activity
• MDL-60817: Notify the user when the original file extension has been removed or modified
• MDL-67924: Move turn editing button out of the edit menu on boost

Warm thanks

To everyone in the cloud team who are extremely busy at the moment.

Cold numbers

15 issues have been successfully integrated, with 5 rejected and 19 delayed. That's 75% success this week!

Notes

• The dates of the next releases will undergo some adjustments, moving Moodle 3.9 to June 2020 and Moodle 4.0 to November 2021. Check the Roadmap for additional information.
• There are 68 issues awaiting peer review. Coding is only half the job. Peer reviewers, keep fighting!
• Are you an H5P lover? Do you know that you can follow the H5P integration into Moodle core in the H5P forum?

Hot topics

• MDL-68146: Did you notice help and advanced icons were shown twice for checkboxes in forms? Regression detected and fixed.
• MDL-67063: Added a new plugin type, **h5plib**, that will allow installing new H5P versions.
• MDL-66671: Fixed a crash when a resource used by LTI is removed.
• MDL-67827: Fixed random failures during testing. Haven't you started to hate the word random, or is it just me?
• MDL-68030: The layout of the activity selection elements has been refined.
• And lots more in areas like calendar, accessibility, administration, h5p, favourites, messages...

One at a time

Remember this (non-regular) initiative in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way. You'll find the basic plan here.

Two weeks ago, we started this section with MDLSITE-5967: Stop requiring MOODLE_INTERNAL for files without side-effects.

• Finally, we agreed MOODLE_INTERNAL is not required any more in files without side-effects (i.e. single class definitions, interfaces or traits). Thanks to all the people who have shared their opinion 😃
• The docs have been updated and some issue has been created add some extra-checks covering the agreed policy (MDLSITE-6093).

We're now ready to discuss, debate, amend and, ultimately, vote, a new policy issue... Ready?

• MDLSITE-5879: Respect PSR-1, and PSR-12 where no existing rule exists

It's time to comment and/or vote! Remember cutoff will happen next Friday 00:00 UTC 😜

Warm thanks

To healthcare professionals, working on the front lines these days is challenging and exhausting. Not only do they have to deal with long shifts and make difficult decisions, but they also return home to their loved ones in fear.

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 21 delayed. That's 90% success rate this week!

Notes:

• On Monday, 9th of March the minor/security Moodle 3.5.11, 3.6.9, 3.7.5 and 3.8.2 versions will be released. Remember to rebase your patches and upgrade your sites. 👏
• Last week we started the non-regular section "One at a time", choosing MDLSITE-5967 (Stop requiring MOODLE_INTERNAL for files without side-effects) as the first policy issue to vote and decide. Thanks a lot to all the people who have shared their thoughts and preference there! Next week we'll announce the outcome of this issue and will try to propose the next policy issue to decide. Keep tuned! 😉
• There are 63 issues awaiting peer-review... Let's keep this number lower! I still think (and hope), someday there will be less than 50 💪
  
• BTW, have you seen this week the dates for the MoodleMootGlobal were announced? November 17-19 in Barcelona. See you there! 😊

Hot topics:

• MDL-63316: Give back the default sort behaviour (lastname) in the participant table
  
• MDL-33671: Need bulk delete files in "My private files" repository
• MDL-67263: Ability to search for activities in the picker.
• MDL-67504: Allow virus checks to be retried if they returned an error state
• MDL-67863: Ensure keyboard focus order is efficient and logical
  
• MDL-67891: Uninstalling Cohort roles tool can break site upgrade
  
• And lots more in areas like h5p, accessibility...
  

Warm thanks:

• To all women in the world, especially to the less fortunate. Tons of kisses and all the support from HQ 😘#EachForEqual #IWD2020

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 26 delayed. That's 91% success, good one!

Notes:

• Next Monday, 9th of March we will be releasing the minor/security Moodle 3.5.11, 3.6.9, 3.7.5 and 3.8.2 versions. This week we'll be focussed on bug fixes to get as many of them included in the releases.
• Five weeks for Moodle 3.9 LTS code freeze: Monday, 6th of April.
• There are, right now, 65 issues awaiting peer-review. Will we break the 50 barrier ever?

Hot topics:

• MDL-67132 : LTI advanced grades now accounted in calculations and course totals.
• MDL-67865 : Accessibility fixes to user menu.
• MDL-67364 : Fixed TinyMCE editor font sizes.
• MDL-64686 : Improve the "Search Courses" layout on small devices.
• MDL-67950 : Apply the "passwordpolicy". setting consistently.
• And lots more in areas like h5p, administration (app settings), messaging, accessibility, tasks...

One at a time

This (non-regular) new initiative in the integration posts aims to get various policy issues communicated and, with your collaboration, decided and applied in an organised way. The (basic) plan is:

• Only one policy issue will be handled at a time.
• A candidate policy issue is picked. It must be well delimited/defined, have some research and a clear list of alternatives to be discussed and, ultimately, voted.
• During the week (cutoff on Friday 00:00 UTC normally), anybody interested can go to the issue, comment, vote (disclaimer: votes may be not the deciding factor).
• Once the time is over, a decision is taken, shared and applied (documentation, code-checker rules... whatever is needed).
• Start over (hopefully with a different policy issue ).

Note that the plan above is subject to changes while we experiment with it, but the main point is to try to keep it simple, agile and interesting enough for all you, beloved hackers!

And, to start with something feasible, this is the the very first "One at a time" policy issue proposed:

• MDLSITE-5967 : Stop requiring MOODLE_INTERNAL for files without side-effects.

See you there!

Warm thanks:

• To Juan Leyva, Dani Palou, Pau Ferrer, Berta Maroto, Isabel Renedo and Noel de Martin, from the Moodle Apps team. For all the hard work with the mobile and desktop apps, continuously contributing with web-services improvements to core and, specifically, this week, for their awesomeness testing stuff in time (). Seriously, a really well-oiled gang, thanks to all!

We live in an age where
apps update themselves
but our mindset doesn't.
--- Nitya Prakash`

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 18 delayed - 88.2% success. Nice!

Notes:

• There are 66 issues currently awaiting peer review. Yay! Let's keep bringing this number down!💪
• We're down to 6 weeks before the 3.9 code freeze. Time flies! Make sure to have those new features and improvements ready by then! Participate in the discussions/vote for/peer-review the issues that you look forward to landing in 3.9!

Hot topics:

• Additional activity chooser improvements have landed!
  • MDL-67321 - Support tabs in the new activity chooser
  • MDL-67585 - New API for extending the activity chooser and implementation of favouriting
• MDL-67309 - New admin setting to call check_password_policy on every login

Warm thanks:

• To Moodle HQ's Tamara Smith and Moodle HQ Perth's Office Relocation Committee (PORC 🐷) team, for the excellent work in organising our move to the new Moodle HQ here in Perth! Stay tuned for more news about our new Perth HQ!

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 77% success rate this week!

Notes:

• Remember: Enrollments for the first edition of the Moodle admin MOOC will start on 17th February.
  
• Some recommendations for writing good testing instructions can be found here. Some key points are:

1. Number all the steps. Add those easy # at the beginning and done. That's all, not a big effort, but a huge (in practice) difference.
2. When possible, differentiate preparation steps from clear expectations.
3. Keep steps simple, especially validation ones, checking one thing only on each.
4. Put expectations in bold ("check", "verify", "ensure"...).
5. When adding code snippets/CLI commands in testing instructions, please enclose them in {noformat} or {code} instead of double curly braces. It prevents the snippet/CLI command from breaking and makes them easier to copy and paste.

Hot topics:

• MDL-67264: Rework/Redesign the activity chooser
  
• MDL-67060: Improve admin UI to manage H5P libraries and give information about H5P tools' status
  
• MDL-67635: Speed up file system \core\task\file_trash_cleanup_task
• MDL-67878: grunt does not run on Windows

Warm thanks:

• Our beloved Eloy Lafuente (stronk7)... for being always there and take care of all of us (people, servers, family...). It's a big pleasure working with you!! 😘😍💃

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 82% success rate this week!

Notes:

• The number of issues waiting for peer review is plummeting. Well done! However, there are still 70 issues waiting for some love! Do you think we can achieve to get them under 50 before the end of February? #ibetyes 💪
  
• First edition of the Moodle admin MOOC is coming! Enrollments will start on 17th February.
• Chrome 80 was released 3 days ago. The SameSite-by-default and SameSite=None-requires-Secure behaviours will begin rolling out to Chrome 80 Stable for an initial limited population starting the week of February 17, 2020. Hopefully, thanks to contributors in MDL-67175, such as Sam, Dan, Brendan, Ferran and Andrew, all supported Moodle branches will continue working after this change.

Hot topics:

• MDL-67726: Admin PHP unit webrunner tool requires additional input escaping
  
• MDL-67681: Performance: Course category tree cache is stored in multiple keys
  
• MDL-67175: Heads up on changes required for Chrome 80
  
• MDL-66463: Adding "Go to top" link when scrolling down in boost and classic themes
  
• MDL-49103: Badge baking uses tEXt instead of iTXt
  
• MDL-46542: Allow setting a subset of the available units in moodleform duration field

Warm thanks:

• All the people working remotely around the world, especially our beloved team in Perth... You will never be alone! 😘

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 77% success, not bad, excellency comes at a cost!

Notes:

• NINE, is the number of weeks for Moodle 3.9 LTS code freeze! You heard it here first!
• There are, right now, 79 issues awaiting peer-review. it seems that, lately, the trend is positive. Let's aim get them under control, below 50!
• A special note about behat_data_generators::the_following_exist() that has been removed in all maintained branches (35 and up). People using it (in custom behat steps) should immediately change all uses to behat_data_generators::the_following_entities_exist(). See MDL-67691 for more information.

Hot topics:

• Fixed various problems marking both notifications (MDL-57755) and messages (MDL-56389) as read.
• MDL-67351 : New "required" admin flag for mod forms, allowing to require some settings to be enabled in all mod instances site-wide.
• MDL-67626 : Fixed a problem with IE and assignment submissions. Please move on (to a modern browser!).
• MDL-67414 : PostgreSQL 12 support added.
• MDL-67472 : Fixed the ability of setting the drawer background color via SCSS variable.
• And lots more in areas like behat, admin, quizzes, user management...

Warm thanks:

• To Mark Paget and Eduard Cercós, from the DevOps team. For keeping all the machinery up and running, in a proactive and supportive way. It's not an easy thing to achieve. Many, many thanks!

Devs are from Venus, Ops are from Mars
--- Steven Haines

Cold numbers:

30 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 4 delayed. That is a 91% success rate this week.

Notes:

• We are down to 83 issues in the peer review list. This is down further from last week. Great work everyone. Let's keep the number decreasing.

Hot topics:

• MDL-62815 mod_lti capabilities to control adding external tools.
• MDL-65952 mod_scorm automatically checks "passed" and "completed" completion options
• MDL-59594 Allow graceful fast exit of cron.php / adhoc_task.php via SIGTERM or SIGINT

Warm thanks:

To everyone in the Perth Moodle office helping to get us out of our current location.

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 13 delayed. That's 87% success rate this week!

Notes:

• Remember it's important to make a call about the responsiveness (to everybody) needed within the weekly cycles. Any delay in the week, at any stage (questions, requests for changes, testing delay, progress feedback...) is not ideal and causes problems. Please, try to be on guard about your ongoing issues being integrated (irrespectively of the role that you have on them).
  
• You can find more information and links about what to expect for Moodle 3.9 in the Roadmap page.
  
• The number of issues waiting for peer review has started falling to 86! Great work all in further reducing this. Let's continue working on it!
  
• As expected, last Monday 13th January Moodle 3.5.10, 3.6.8, 3.7.4 and 3.8.1 minors were released. Remember to rebase your patches and upgrade your sites
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-59562: Allow plugins to declare which major stable versions of moodle are supported
  
• MDL-67486: Minimize how long we hold the global cron lock for
• MDL-65812: Increase session timeout and allow it to be configurable in the GUI to a large time period
• MDL-64075: Antivirus: Support remote scanning using TCP sockets
• MDL-67204: Assignment calendar events with "alwaysshowdescription" get updated on every task run because of not updated "lastcron" field
• Upgraded libraries:
  • MDL-67382: phpCAS
  • MDL-67379: SCSSPHP
  • MDL-67377: Mustache.php
  • MDL-67384: jQuery EU Cookie Law popups

Warm thanks:

• To Guy Thomas, for sharing with us his experience with VueJs and Moodle during the Developer meeting January 2020. If you missed it, you're lucky because, as always, you can watch the recording

Cold numbers:

24 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 11 delayed. That's 87% success rate this week!

Notes:

• Next Monday 13th January we'll be releasing Moodle 3.5.10, 3.6.8, 3.7.4 and 3.8.1 minor releases. Thanks to everybody that has helped to build them.
  
• There are still a lot of good policy issues that we should be able to decide about, making them part of our lifes. Feel free to look at them, pick some and participate in the discussions.
  
• Near 100 issues are awaiting peer review. Any help is always welcome!! Let's reduce this number!
  
• A new edition of the Learn Moodle MOOC will be starting on 13 January 2020. You can still sign up for free and connect with the Moodle community.

Hot topics:

• MDL-66752: Develop an automatic approval tool for delete/export of personal data
  
• MDL-63734: If passwordunmask field is hardcoded in config.php, do not show the value
  
• MDL-67378: Upgrade mustache.js to latest version
  
• MDL-67376: Upgrade loglevel.js to latest version
  
• MDL-67336: Forum inline reply option is applying filters before saving content in the DB
  
• MDL-66871: Moodle calendar is not able to import .ics files with repeated events anymore
  
• MDL-67596: Cron / adhoc task runners ramp up slowly for no reason
  
• And lots more in areas like accessibility, performance...
  

Warm thanks:

• To David Monllaó, from Moodle HQ. We're going to miss you, your smile and your hard work a lot! Amigo, all the best for you! 😘
  
• To Víctor Déniz Falcón, our new integrator. Muyayo, we're happy having you and your knowledge in the iTeam! Welcome on board!

Cold numbers:

24 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 9 delayed. 85% is a pretty good success rate considering the number of people on leave over Christmas, so kudos!

Notes:

• The peer review queue is still sizeable. Let's try to tackle some of that over the coming weeks.
• Reminder that minor releases are scheduled for Jan 13th.
  
  

Hot Topics:

MDL-65809: Moodle 3.9 requirements have been decided and pushed! PHP 7.2 is now required, among other things.
MDL-67467: CSV progress reports are now sortable by date
MDL-59487: Scheduled tasks can now be re-run via the web

Warm thanks:

To everyone who contributed in some way, shape or form to Moodle in 2019! We're making some great stuff, so let's make it another great year in 2020!

Cold numbers:

26 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 6 delayed. That's 90% success, nice one to finish the year!

Notes:

• A friendly call to our coding style rules for variables. This time (by coincidence), about always using positive variable names (allow, enable...), not negative ones (prevent, disable...).
• There are, right now, 120 issues awaiting peer-review. While it's a beautiful and rounded number... I pretty much would prefer to see a 20 there.
• We won't be rolling changes this week (23th Dec). You can expect the next batch of fixes and improvements to arrive in 2020 (2nd/3rd Jan).
• Next minor / security releases will happen in 3 weeks from now (13th Jan).

Hot topics:

• MDL-54554 : Improved unoconv error handling.
• MDL-66503 : Fix SCORM player visualization in Classic.
• MDL-67483 : Improve adhoc tasks QoS at scale.
• MDL-67327 : Avoid some crashes with JS caching enabled.
• And lots more in areas like tasks, administration, libraries, user management...

Warm thanks:

• To the peaceful!

When the power of love
overcomes the love of power,
the world will know peace.
--- Jimi Hendrix

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 79% success, not bad, given many issues are new features and improvements!

Notes:

• Work is happening around the Moodle 3.9 roadmap. Still being defined and decided, but worth a look.
• The minimum requirements for the next Moodle 3.9 release (LTS) have been settled and, soon, they will be enforced. Noticeable changes from the previous (3.8) version are:
  • PHP 7.2
  • Moodle 3.5 or later required to upgrade.
  • MariaDB 10.2.29
  • PostgreSQL 9.5
• Related with the above, MDL-67415 has been created to start discussing about the next-next Moodle 4.0 requirements.
• Here there is an interesting discussion about the usability of the notification preferences (user and admin).
• We won't be rolling changes the Xmas week (23th Dec). Instead will accumulate issues over 2 weeks, aiming to generate the next weeklies already in 2020 (2nd/3rd Jan).

Hot topics:

• MDL-67458 : Fixed problems with cohorts and non-existing roles.
• MDL-67277 : Avoid bold subjects in discussion lists.
• MDL-66708 : Stop regenerating LTI keys on every tool edition.
• And lots more in areas like forum, themes, quiz, libraries...

Warm thanks:

• To Brendan Heywood, from Catalyst IT (AU), for all the fixes and improvements within various Moodle core backend areas. Also for all the cool contributions in the plugins area. Many, many thanks!

We spend the first twelve months of our children's lives
teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve (years?)
telling them to sit down and shut up.
--- Phyllis Diller (with own reflexion).

Cold numbers: 21 / 5 / 0 ~ 80%

Notes: M39 reqs, apply!, 124 P2P!

Hot topics: MDL-67160, MDL-62757, MDL-66877, MDL-67363, ...

Warm thanks: ty!

The shortest answer is doing.
--- George Herbert

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 88% success, slightly over the average!

Notes:

• After 9 intense weeks, with 262 issues successfully integrated and Moodle 3.8 released, we are back to normal. Time to analyze how the release went and continue planning and preparing the next Moodle 3.9 (LTS), to be released May 2020. Who said "boring normality", heh?
• Dragged from the previous "Integration exposed" post, and augmented, here there are some good policy issues to paint the bikeshed ship (feel free to participate on any of them):
  • MDL-55171 : Modify our current (fixed to 2 years / 4 releases) code deprecation policy.
  • MDLSITE-5879 : Fallback to PSR-1/12 when something is not part of/against Moodle own coding rules.
  • MDL-49238 : SQL indentation coding style.
  • MDLSITE-5972 and MDLSITE-5667 : Type hinting.
  • MDLSITE-4776 : Short array syntax.
• Over the next weeks will be working on every 3.8 regression detected, towards Moodle 3.8.1 release in January 2020.
• Special mention to the issue deciding Moodle 3.9 requirements, right now being voted and decided (2 days remaining)!
• PHP 7.4.0 has been just released. We are working to get Moodle working seamlessly with it @ MDL-66260 (login required to see all the Epic issues).

Hot topics:

• Nothing specially remarkable, see the list to get an idea.

Warm thanks:

• To PHP, for keeping us hooked and entertained. All the time!

There's no excuse to be bored.
Sad, yes. Angry, yes.
Depressed, yes. Crazy, yes.
But there's no excuse for boredom, ever.
-- Viggo Mortensen

Cold numbers:

26 issues have been successfully integrated, 5 rejected and 15 delayed - 83.87% success. Not so bad, eh!

Notes:

• Code freeze is fast approaching (10 days and counting!). If you want your cool features to be considered for Moodle 3.8, make sure to have them peer-reviewed and sent to integration on or before 7 October 2019!
• There are 75 issues currently awaiting peer review. A lot of them could be adding cool new features that could make Moodle 3.8 more awesome! Please check them out!

Hot topics:

• Forum UI improvements have landed!
  • MDL-66481 - Discussion list table updates
  • MDL-64821 - A new and modern forum discussion view
• MDL-66388 - Create a new button in atto to add H5P content in anywhere from hp5.com and h5p.org external URLs
• MDL-65588 - New insights for students who have not logged in recently

Warm thanks:

• To Amaia Anabitarte for livening the developer floor of Moodle's Perth HQ in the past three months. (Wow, it's been three months already?!?!) Safe travels and we hope that you'll be back again soon!

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 14 delayed. That's 75% success rate this week!

Notes:

• 7 weeks to release, and just 2 weeks to code freeze. Nothing to be scared of, right?
  
• Have you seen the new "CI" badges in the Tracker? A JS filter has been created for converting the Jenkins DEV Jobs links to them. MDL-66550 is a good example to see how they look like because it's plenty of them.
  
• Have you ever heard about the https://hub.docker.com/r/moodlehq/moodle-php-apache images? They are used in the moodle-docker and the moodle-ci-runner
• There are still a lot of good policy issues that we should be able to decide about, making them part of our lifes. Feel free to look at them, pick some and participate in the discussions.
• There are still 78 issues awaiting peer review. There are less than some weeks ago, but still a lot of nice features are waiting for some extra-eyes. Any help is always welcome!!
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-64438: Display course category in course-related block
• MDL-40669: 'emailstop' added again to upload bulk users using CSV
• MDL-66536: Insight notifications improvements
• MDL-66156: Deleting a course that's been starred causes error
• And lots more in areas like web services, performance, themes...

Warm thanks:

• All the people organising, supporting and attending to any of the Global Climate Strike events around the world this week (20th to 27th September) #climatestrike #noplanetB

Cold numbers:

33 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 9 delayed. That's 87% success, exactly our all-time average!

Notes:

• Next Monday 9th September we'll be releasing Moodle 3.5.8, 3.6.6 and 3.7.2 minor releases. Thanks to everybody that has helped building them.
• One month and one day (just 4 working weeks!) away from 3.8 code freeze. Time to become (not) stressed.
• Our standard policy is, always, to apply any bug-fix to all the supported version at a given time and sure you know that. But are you aware about our process for requesting a non bug-fix backport.
• There are some good policy issues that we should be able to decide about, making them part of our lifes. Here there is a interesting/interested (topdown on importance) pick:
  • MDL-55171 : Modify our current (fixed to 2 years / 4 releases) code deprecation policy.
  • MDLSITE-5879 : Fallback to PSR-1/12 when something is not part of/against Moodle own coding rules.
  • MDL-49238 : SQL indentation coding style.
• There are still 98 issues awaiting peer review... a wise Czech guy I love would say "lalala".

Hot topics:

• MDL-66457 : Improve behat xpath nested selectors.
• MDL-66367 : Added versioning to cached templates.
• MDL-66551 : Fixed orphaned calendar subscriptions.
• MDL-63315 : Fix problem with PostgreSQL when persistence is used.
• And lots more in areas like javascript, user management, languages, themes, administration...

Warm thanks:

• To NDAs. Cannot say more!

The man who can keep a secret may be wise,
but he is not half as wise
as the man with no secrets to keep.
-- Edgar Watson Howe

Cold numbers

23 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 18 delayed. 85% success rate this week.

Notes

• The Travis failures we have been seeing on Redis 5 should now be resolved, thanks to MDL-66139. Nice work Juan and Eloy for tracking down that one.
  

Hot topics

• MDL-66375 - The forgotten password feature can now be disabled for the Moodle Mobile app.
• MDL-66326 - Global search now removes deleted courses from search index
  
• MDL-60341 - Cache setting canuselocalstore is now visible is main definitions list
  
• MDL-66139 - Moodle now works when using the Redis 5 extension.
  

Warm thanks

To all the folks at Catalyst who work tirelessly on improving Moodle. Keep those performance improvements coming!

Cold numbers

18 issues have been successfully integrated, 7 rejected and 16 delayed - 72% success - there have been a lot of bigger issues in the queue this week, with lots of new features beginning to land

Notes

• We have a request for comments on changes to our current deprecation policy - join in the forum discussion or discuss on the issue - MDL-55171. We really need your input for change such as this to please do take the time to take part in the discussion. This will affect you.
• You may have noticed that the latest versions of Chrome are currently not functional for Behat. Chrome have started to move away from the JSONWire protocol. A fix for this should land shortly in MDL-66378, and we are looking to change the WebDriver package we are using in MDL-66437. This change will allow us to support newer browsers.
• The next point release is 3 weeks away on the 9th September - if you’re working on any bugs then now is a good time to be pushing them for Integration to ensure they make the deadline
• Code freeze is 7 weeks away on the October

Hot topics

• MDL-66071 - fix for updating the user profile when using a non-internal auth method
• Moodle now supports ES6 Javascript. Documentation has been updated to reflect this.

Warm thanks

To the many readers of this Integration exposed forums. Thanks for all the love of late

Cold numbers:

31 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 13 delayed - 91.2% success. Awesome!

Notes:

• 96 issues currently awaiting peer review. Way better than the last few weeks! Let's keep the pace up!
• Woohoo! We're now roughly 8 weeks away from code freeze!
• The Moodle UX Team is looking for participants to join the second part of the 3.8 Forum Grading Design Survey. Should you wish to participate, feel free to check it out!

Hot topics:

• MDL-66306 - Upgrade PHPMailer
• MDL-50346 - Remove the restriction to forbid subdirectories in the templates directory
• MDL-33884 - Prevent out of memory errors during questions export
• MDL-64598 - Fix sizing of emojis in emails

Warm thanks:

• To Sara Arjona Téllez for gracing us her presence in Moodle's Perth HQ for the past two weeks. We hope to see you again soon!

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 1 delayed. That's an exact 80% success, five points better than last week!

Notes:

• The initial research about becoming PHP 7.4 compliant is happening @ MDL-66260 (login required). It seems that there are a number of changes to perform to avoid lots of warning messages about deprecated stuff. Both in core and third part libraries. We'll go advancing towards achieving it as soon as possible. In any case, fun guaranteed!
• Keep the list of tracker labels fresh in your brains. They really help detecting, classifying and processing issues. Every participant in an issue is really welcome to keep the labels updated and meaningful.
• While not 100% final, the Moodle 3.8 roadmap is looking promising, expect more details coming soon about many of those projects.
• There are still 110 issues awaiting peer review. Good news is that 56 issues were peer-reviewed last week! Great work!

Hot topics:

• MDL-66192 : Allow subdirectories for AMD modules. With the same rules/restrictions than Moodle namespaced PHP directories.
• MDL-64887 : Bootstrap updated to 4.3.1
• MDL-35773 : New option to perform file-less backups.
• MDL-65918 : Fixed some OAuth errors happening on 1st login.
• And lots more in areas like messaging, authentication, installation, usability, admin...

Warm thanks:

• To Amaia Anabitarte, from Moodle HQ, a true citizen of the World (London, Donostia, Barcelona, Perth... what's next!?). For all the hard work trying to improve the consistency and future of mobile acceptance testing, supporting the dev Community as part of the Plugins guardians team. Mila esker! (a thousand of thanks).

Travel makes one modest. You see what
a tiny place you occupy in the world.
-- Gustave Flaubert

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 2 delayed. That's an exact 75% success, we can do it better!

Notes:

• Recently, after various iterations, we agreed about making the weekly integration cycles to follow an stricter schedule, with a clearer (and automated) integration cutoff time setup on Thursday 12:00 (UTC+8). Everything not finished by then will be reopened (more work is needed) or officially delayed (getting the integration priority raised for next week).
  The main motivation is to better define the outcome of every issue getting all the weekly cycles "finished" (integrated, reopened, delayed) instead of allowing issues to hang on integration over multiple cycles without action.
  Of course, remind that, both given the tight weekly schedule and the round roundness of the Earth, it's really important to stay active, agile and responsive with all your issues being integrated. Any delay will affect their final outcome.
• There are a couple of interesting "sister" issues progressing about allowing subdirectories within both templates (MDL-50346) and AMD modules (MDL-66192). Your input there (naming rules, limitations, ideas, anything...) is welcome.
• With 122 issues awaiting peer review it's time to sound the alarm, indeed! We need those numbers lowered a lot!

Hot topics:

• MDL-62497 : Support for (transpiling) ES6 into AMD modules added (expect some good documentation soon covering aspects like source-maps, grunt-watch and other technical details).
• MDL-61043 : Progressing towards a common select all/none UI in Moodle.
• MDL-50733 : Behat upgraded to 3.5.
• MDL-66143, MDL-66144 : First steps adding support for personalised relative dates in courses.
• And lots more in areas like policies, backup & restore, search, grading...

Warm thanks:

• To all those particularly helpful Moodlers. What an incredible group of people, helping others, sharing their knowledge and experience, writing awesome posts... Every one of you are a very important part of the vibrant Moodle Community. Many, many thanks!

It starts with you in your own community. Just being kind to one another, being supportive of one another, and being loving and respectful. I can't tell you how far that will get you in life, just being able to do that.
-- Ally Brooke

Cold numbers:

32 issues have been successfully integrated with 7 rejected and 4 delayed. That's 82% success, slightly under average!

Notes:

• Some weeks ago we passed the 15,000 integrated issues mark! It all (the "new" development process) started 8 years and 2 months ago (May 2011). Looking forward the next 15,000 issues, they only will be possible with you, time flies!
• Soon we will be discussing about Moodle 3.9 requirements. Expect a number of raised requirements coming with it (php version, databases, Moodle upgradeable versions...). Plus, it will be one of those biennial LTS releases.
• Developers documentation is really critical to help everybody to write good Moodle code, please check if you have any issue with pending documentation.
• Progress on the 3.8 libraries review Epic (requires login) - continues, and a lot of renewed third party stuff is landing.
• Right now there are 115 issues awaiting peer review. We really should try to reduce the queue ASAP. Any help is extremely welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-65908 : Better RTL support within annotated PDFs.
• MDL-65794 : Enable caching of impersonated web service calls.
• MDL-62836 : Make awarding badges group/grouping compliant.
• MDL-65751 : jQuery upgrade to latest 3.4.1 (it's being considered to backport it to stable branches).
• MDL-60013 : core/modal_confirm dialogue has been finally removed (was deprecated since Moodle 3.4).
• And lots more in areas like libraries, themes, assignment, quiz & questions, files API...

Warm thanks:

• To Víctor Déniz Falcón, from Moodle HQ, always there, always supportive and helpful. And, not less important, an active and shinning member of the Plugins guardians team. Thanks!

A little more persistence, a little more effort,
and what seemed hopeless failure
may turn to glorious success.
-- Elbert Hubbard

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated, 5 rejected and 2 delayed - 78.2% success. Not bad!

Notes:

• 117 issues currently awaiting peer review. Time to bring this number waaaayyy down! Your help will be greatly appreciated!
• Moodle 3.8 requirements have been settled and applied. Required minimum PHP version will still be 7.1 and the required minimum Moodle version will still be Moodle 3.2. SQL Server requirement has been raised from 2008 (10) to 2012 (11).
• Check out some of the projects that HQ will be working on for 3.8 on the roadmap.

Hot topics:

• Library updates:
  • MDL-65741 - Replace PHPExcel with PHPSpreadsheet
  • MDL-65772 - Upgrade MongoDB PHP Library
  • MDL-64794 - Upgrade TCPDF lib for PHP 7.3
  • MDL-64998 - Remove PHP Less compiler
  • MDL-65747 - Remove unused Pear_Crypt_CHAP Library
  ... and many more!
• Deprecations:
  • MDL-57617 - Final deprecation of functions in lib/deprecatedlib.php deprecated in 3.3
  • MDL-59525 - Final deprecation of functions in lib/deprecatedlib.php deprecated in 3.4
  ... among others.
• MDL-64002 - Add buffering for sending messages
• MDL-65562 - Report on the actions executed by users on predictions
• MDL-48610 - Show alphabet filter in grader report even if there are less than 100 of users
• MDL-65646 - Move dependencies and sub-plugins to JSON

Warm thanks:

• To Séverin Terrier. For reminding us that a lot of people from the community also rely on our Integration Exposed entries to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in Moodle core!
• To one of HQ's point persons when it comes to Moodle's calendar, quiz and questions, and now father to a beautiful daughter, Shamim Rezaie! Congrats!

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 25 delayed. That's 90% success, not bad at all!

Notes:

• Six weeks to release, and only one week to code freeze. (tick-tock, tic-tac, チクタク...)
• Starting this week (April 1st, heh!), we enter into continuous integration mode, aiming to a couple of releases each week (Tuesday, Friday) towards agiler processing of the backlog. Along this period we don't use to "spam" you with rebase messages and other communications (like these posts) unless there is something important to share. We'll be back at the end of the on-sync period (2 weeks after release).
• Given the dates commented above, it's specially important to make the last effort trying to progress the current 76 issues awaiting peer review. Specially because, after freeze, hardly any new feature or improvement will be accepted.

Hot topics:

• MDL-64820 : Forum updated to use templates.
• MDL-63196 : Calendar export to handle category events.
• MDL-62992 : Hide the questions tag filter when tags are disabled.
• MDL-63995 : Remove the "addinstance" capability from some blocks (dashboard page).
• And lots more in areas like roles, calendar, removal of old cron functions, administration...

Warm thanks:

• To Peter Dias, from Moodle HQ, for his effort into a good number of issues. From some of the new forum features that will be unveiled with Moodle 3.7, to the work fixing bugs in a number of components. Always alert, always supportive. Many thanks!

We're all on a continuous journey to try and fix our mistakes and flaws. And, believe me, I've got plenty of them.

-- Ezekiel Emanuel

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 9 rejected and 26 delayed. That's 75% success, had to reopen some sister issues together, sure next round we can do it better!

Notes:

• Seven weeks to release, and just two week to code freeze. Can you feel the breath of the beast?
• The brand new theme_classic has met core this week (MDL-64505). You can find some useful information about all these theme changes in the dev Moodle Docs. Please play with classic much as you can with the new theme and report any glitch / problem in the tracker. This is one more milestone in the process of deprecating and removing all the Bootstrap 2 themes from core, moving everything to Bootstrap 4. You can find more information in the 3.7 roadmap.
• There are, right now, 66 issues awaiting peer review. Any help toward lowering that number is welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-62872 : Problems recording video and max allowed sizes.
• MDL-63263 : Recycle bin now includes user data.
• MDL-64979 : Reability of behat tests in slow machines via configuration.
• MDL-64990 : Don't play messaging user tours with messaging disabled.
• And lots more in areas like calendar, messaging, dashboard, analytics, UI...

Warm thanks:

• To Alexander Bias, from Ulm University, for all his sustained collaboration with Moodle since ages ago, helping in hundred of issues in the Tracker, with dozens of plugin contributions. Because of all that awesome stuff, helping to the whole Moodle Community... big, big, thanks!

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?

-- Alice in Wonderland

Cold numbers:

Notes:

• At the time of writing this, there are 57 issues waiting for peer review. Great work all in further reducing this. Let's keep up that effort and keep the number falling!

Hot topics:

• MDL-13745 - Moodle now has a means to verify a mail server configuration, allowing administrators to quickly test their settings.
• MDL-64773 - a new UI option allowing users to mute (disable notifications) for specific conversations in messaging.
  
• MDL-60059 - Workshop events can now be dragged and dropped in the calendar.
• MDL-63230 - The file picker now displays long file names nicely.
  
  

Warm thanks

• To Barbara Ramiro, of Moodle HQ, for her tireless efforts working on Moodle's user experience design. Everyone here appreciates your hard work and dedication, and it shows with some great results! Keep it up!

Cold numbers:

34 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 17 delayed. That's 97% success, practically perfection!

Notes:

• The 17 issues accounted as delayed are, all them, new features and improvements targeting exclusively Moodle 3.7 (that will be released on May 13th, if everything goes as smoothly as expected). That's barely nine weeks from now!
• Always critical, but specially when the final weeks before release arrive, it's important to make a call about the responsiveness (to everybody) needed within the weekly cycles. Any delay in the week, at any stage (questions, requests for changes, testing delay, progress feedback...) is not ideal and causes problems. Please, try to be on guard about your ongoing issues being integrated (irrespectively of the role that you have on them).
• As commented some days ago, next Monday (March 11th), we'll be releasing minor/security updates. That includes Moodle 3.1.17, 3.4.8, 3.5.5 and 3.6.3.

Hot topics:

• MDL-64652 : Solved problem with privacy data requests exhausting the available memory.
• MDL-64941 : Multichoice questions inside cloze losing attempt values after restore.
• MDL-64971 : Use of non-existing capabilities within accesslib is not allowed anymore.
• MDL-62869 : Global search now can return, via configuratio settings, info from all the courses and their contents as far as the user can view or access to them.
• And lots more in areas like themes, assignment, dashboard, competencies, cron...

Warm thanks:

• To Dmitrii Metelkin, from Catalyst IT, for all his hard work within Moodle core in a number of places. Clever, patient and focussed, many thanks for all your awesome contributions!

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.

― Confucius

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 11 delayed. That's 90% success, well over average!

Notes:

• The work towards deprecating and removing Bootstrap version 2 themes is advancing well. This week (see MDL-58428) a lot of templates were moved around, preparing stuff for the next steps in the project.
• You can find more information and links about what to expect for next Moodle versions in the Roadmap page.
• Next Monday (March 11th), we'll be releasing minor/security updates. That includes Moodle 3.1.17, 3.4.8, 3.5.5 and 3.6.3.
• There are, right now, 67 issues awaiting peer review. Any help aiming to lower that number is welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-64878 : Fixed some problems accessing to grade items corresponding to hidden or removed activities.
• MDL-60944 : Allow analytic models to be imported/exported.
• MDL-60683 : Quiz module cron now using the scheduled tasks system.
• MDL-52167 : Add support for hidden/disabled interdependencies between admin settings.
• And lots more in areas like messages, assignment, web services, user tours...

Warm thanks:

• To Mathew May, from Moodle HQ, for his great job in general and, more specifically, for his attention to the detail when moving all the templates and output stuff towards the incoming, Bootstrap version 4 only, themes future. Well done!

Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.

― Lao Tzu

Cold numbers

30 issues were successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 1 delayed. 83.88% success this week. A slight decrease from last week - this is largely due to lack of timely feedback from developers on their issues..

A quick reminder to developers that issues in Integration will be reopened if there is no response to feedback. This allows us to integrate as many issuee as possible within the normal Integration Review Schedule.

Notes

• There are currently 66 issues waiting for peer review. Please take a look at the list and see if you can help.
• The Integration queue is now largely under control.

Hot topics

• MDL-64093 - A new site setting has been introduced for the "Press on Enter" user preference in the 3.6 Messaging API.
• MDL-63944 - Handling of "Select all" checkboxes has been written in the Question Bank. This rewrite introduces a new core/checkbox-toggleall AMD module which can be reused in other areas.
• MDL-64679, MDL-64500, MDL-64314 - Various improvements and bug fixes to the Analytics API and toolset.
• MDL-45151 - Log events are now anonymised for assignment using blind marking

Warm thanks

To Amaia Anabitarte, Arnaud Trouvé, Bas Brands, Carlos Escobedo, Dan Marsden, David Mudrák, Ivan Matviyuk, Sara Arjona, and Victor Déniz who have been reviewing commmunity-contributed plugins.

On this day in 1857, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born.

Amongst many other accomplishments, Hertz was responsible for proving the existence of radio waves.

Cold numbers

34 issues were successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 1 delayed. 91.89% success this week. Let's keep it up.

Notes

• 63 issues are currently awaiting peer review. A bit of a drop since last week and we're continuing to reduce that number - you're all just too hard-working and keep adding to the queue (don't stop)!
• We've been working hard to reduce the integration queue which is now down to 38 issues. Although this seems like a small decrease from last week's 40, many of the larger issues in the queue have now landed.

Hot topics

• MDL-64835 - Browser session storage was not emptied on cache purge
• MDL-63977 - Support for Behat testing of third-party plugins which implement Mobile app functionality (Thanks to Sam Marshall
• MDL-64892 - Fix for incorrect last post date in discussion list
• MDL-63706 - Backport of a change to the "Run now" functionality in the task API
• MDL-64557 - Use of the form hideIf functionality in course forms to hide form elements instead of disable them

Congratulations

To all those who recently completed the Learn Moodle course

Warm thanks

To all those who have contributed and dedicated their time and knowledge to the Moodle Workplace project over the past year. For more information, or to register your interest, visit https://moodle.com/workplace.

On this day in 2001, the Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome was first Published in the International Journal of Science, Nature.

Cold numbers:

29 issues have been successfully integrated, 5 rejected and 0 delayed - 85.3% success. Not bad!

Notes:

• 74 issues currently awaiting peer review. It went up since last week, let's do better this time!
• At the time of writing, we have 40 issues waiting for integration review. Slowly, but surely, the iTeam will catch up with all of these issues soon. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

Hot topics:

• MDL-64454 - A warning is now being displayed on the admin notifications page if CRON does not run regularly.
• Improvements to authentication plugins:
  • MDL-64071 - Better testing of LDAP settings.
  • MDL-60432 - Identity provider for CAS authentication.
  • MDL-62973 - Improved login form for the Shibboleth authentication plugin.
• Book resource improvements:
  • MDL-50793 - Show hidden book pages for teachers.
  • MDL-43385 - Improved print output.

Warm thanks:

• To Jun Pataleta, part of the integration team, who wrote this entry. Thanks for your awesomeness and behavior on everything you participate! Always!

Cold numbers:

25 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 0 delayed - 92.6% success. Awesome!

Notes:

• 66 issues currently awaiting peer review. Let's keep bringing this number down!

Hot topics:

• MDL-64414 - New logical OR and logical AND operations for IF conditions in grade calculations
• MDL-64528 - Prevent manual completion for frozen contexts
• MDL-46881 - Refactoring of forum scheduled task into smaller tasks

Warm thanks:

• To the first 100 people who are participating to test MoodleNet. Your valuable feedback will surely contribute to the success of this exciting project!
• To HQ's dedicated developer, and now father to a beautiful daughter, Mihail Geshoski! Congrats!

Cold numbers:

32 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 57 delayed. That's 87% success, good one!

Notes:

• Since the night of the times all the Moodle forms have come with a fixed id. It was "mform1" (don't ask why!). Starting today that's not anymore true (see MDL-64324). So any use that id in themes, in javascript... will need to be removed for Moodle 3.7 and up.
• Code checker 2.9.3 has been released. It includes PHP 7.3 support and the latest PHP_CodeSniffer (2.9.x) and PHPCompatibility standard. Next step should be to upgrade to PHP_CodeSniffer 3.x soon.
• With 61 issues awaiting peer review and 57 issues under current integration, these are being fun and intense weeks. Any help is welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-64609 : Avoid infinite loops on regrade.
• MDL-57898 : New custom fields applied to courses.
• MDL-58256 : Avoid users being added to groups twice.
• MDL-63623 : New CLI script to uninstall plugins.
• And lots more in areas like questions, accessibility, reports, badges...

Warm thanks:

• To Damyon Wiese and David Monllaó, awesome integrators that are leaving the iTeam, though they will be honorary members forever! Damyon is going to apply all his expertise into accessibility and standards. David will shine as lead data scientist. Sure we start enjoying the fruits of their labours soon!

Each man is a hero and an oracle to somebody.

--- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 69 delayed. That's 95% success, awesome!

Notes:

• Moodle 3.7 requirements have been settled and applied. Changes include requiring PHP 7.1 and Moodle 3.2 (for upgrading).
• A new issue has been created to discuss about Moodle 3.8 requirements. Ideas welcome!
• Right now there are 65 issues awaiting peer review. And 69 issues under current integration. Please, be patient, we'll be working hard trying to reduce those numbers ASAP!

Hot topics:

• MDL-49399 : Capturing cron & tasks execution output.
• MDL-64347 : Configure both max parallelism and execution time for scheduled and adhoc tasks.
• MDL-63677 : Random redirects on policy agreement and signup.
• MDL-63103 : Improve server files repository performance.
• And lots more in areas like messages, administration, themes, resources...

Warm thanks:

• To Sara Arjona and Adrian Greeve, our two new integrators. Hard workers, with fresh ideas, initiative and eager to learn and help all us, welcome onboard!

Patience is not simply the ability to wait -

it's how we behave while we're waiting.

--- Joyce Meyer

Cold numbers:

28 issues have been successfully integrated, 6 rejected and 61 delayed - 82% success.

Notes:

• Next Monday, January 14th, we'll be releasing Moodle 3.1.16, 3.4.7, 3.5.4 and 3.6.2, minor releases including the latest bug and security fixes. From there, barely 2 months to the next minor release.
  
• We still have a large amount of issues waiting to be integrated, but now that everyone is back full time we should be able to get through the list in the next two weeks.

Hot topics:

• MDL-64497 - GDPR: moodle_content_writer can cause endless loop
  
• MDL-64426 - Filters not supported in conversation names in get_conversations()
  
• MDL-64419 - Messaging user info not showing in Bootstrapbase
  
• MDL-64400 - Bloated notifications table full with no way to reduce it down via the UI
  
• MDL-63722 - Question bank window closes when trying to paginate
  
• MDL-63276 - Decide Moodle 3.7 requirements and push them to environment.xml (due date: 2018-12-17)
  
• MDL-49651 - Hidden course sending forum messages
  

Warm thanks:

To Bas Brands for being awarded the "Most helpful Open Source Team member" badge for the Moodle 3.6 release! And also to the rest of the Community for your valuable contribution!

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 39 delayed - 90% success.

Notes:

• In the next 2 weeks most of us will be away on Christmas holidays so we will not be rolling a weekly release next week (and also maybe not the NY one either...). We understand that you are all very eager to have your issues integrated over this period, but if you can bear with us and be patient, we will address them all as soon as possible.

• We have created a new filter to display the current integration queue and the order in which we pick the issues to integrate. Please go to https://tracker.moodle.org/issues/?filter=21421(requires login) to see for yourself.
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-63260 - Duplicating quiz with random question has exponential questions growth.
  
• MDL-62223 - Assignment: Improve submission statement to cover all possible settings.
  

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 10 delayed - 79% success. Seems a bit low, but it's due to the big issues that landed this week!

Notes:

• Code freeze has been moved to the 22nd of October 2018! For more information, check out the official announcement.
• 82 issues currently awaiting peer review. Let's get more done before the code freeze!

Hot topics:

• MDL-63211 - Make message contacts a two-way approval
• MDL-62610 - Improved usability of quiz statistics report for quizzes with random questions
• MDL-62558 - Provide a summarised view of the data registry configuration

Warm thanks:

• To Georgie Holst and the rest of Moodle HQ's Communications Team for organising the recently concluded Moodle Moot Australia 2018 in Brisbane, Queensland. It was a blast! Looking forward to #MootAU19 in Melbourne, Victoria!

Cold numbers:

Over the last two weeks 42 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 9 delayed. That's 93% success, well done!

Notes:

• There are 72 issues awaiting peer-review right now, any help there is welcome, let's aim to get it reduced before 3.6 freeze!
• This is a good time to look to your pending dev docs and complete them for helping everybody else.
• To everybody, please be proactive labeling issues. There are some good standard labels to be used in the Tracker and spending some minutes thinking about them on each issue is a win-win for the whole development process.

Hot topics:

• MDL-63346 : Bump nodejs & npm versions to latest lts/carbon. All supported branches + policy agreed for next bumps.
• MDL-47962 : Performance improvements within the glossary filter.
• MDL-63319 : Enable renaming of reserved words over all supported RDBMs.
• MDL-59227 : Duplicate activity names now adds suffix.
• MDL-63020 : Cross-DB support for unique indexes having null contents.
• MDL-62334 : Add a course from Admin -> Courses.
• And lots more in areas like privacy, calendar, themes, questions...

Warm thanks:

• To Michael Hawkins, from Moodle HQ, for taking over the important Security Officer role recently. Attention to the detail, thoughtful, openness, flexible and responsible. What else? Thanks!

The only system which is truly secure is one which is switched off and unplugged, locked in a titanium lined safe, buried in a concrete bunker, and is surrounded by nerve gas and very highly paid armed guards. Even then, I wouldn't stake my life on it.

-- Gene Spafford (Spaf)

Cold numbers:

10 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 4 delayed. That's 90%, good one!

Notes:

• Moodle 3.1.14, 3.3.8, 3.4.5 and 3.5.2 have been released.
• 8 weeks for Moodle 3.6 release, 4 weeks for QA, 3 weeks for freeze... oh my, oh my!
• We are discussing @ MDL-63346 about the way to proceed when new (lts/carbon right now) versions of nodejs (and associated npm) require changes. Also about when/how to manage updating the dev tools we use.

Hot topics:

• MDL-63231 : Exception editing course settings.
• MDL-51177 : Incorporate the functionality of atto_htmlplus into core.
• Both memcache cache store and session handler have been removed from core.
• MDL-62520 : Make user identity fields searchable in participants page.
• And lots more in areas like quiz, messages, blocks ...

Warm thanks:

• To Susan L. Graham. Thanks!

Many new technologies

come with a promise to change the world,

but the world refuses to cooperate.

---- Henry Petroski

Cold numbers:

24 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 2 delayed - 86% success. Not bad!

Notes:

• 95 issues waiting for peer review. Please give the Moodle integration team lots of issues to integrate. We love it since we're suckers for pain! (No, not really, but please your help will be greatly appreciated!)
• Minor releases coming up Monday, next week. Stay tuned!
• The Policies and Data Privacy plugins will be merged into the standard Moodle distribution in versions 3.3.8 and 3.4.5. If you have them currently installed as additional plugins, please remember that you must remove their folders prior to upgrading to these Moodle versions.

Hot topics:

• MDL-60901 - Decide Moodle 3.6 requirements and push them to environment.xml
• MDL-60820 - Workshop: Allow teacher to specify submission types
• MDL-60578 - Handle course ID correctly for mod_feedback web services
• MDL-56998 - Remove associated blog posts on module instance removal

Warm thanks:

• To Ryan Wyllie for being such a proactive Moodle developer who develops cool and beautiful Moodle features and inspires and encourages HQ devs to be better in everything they do!

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 6 delayed. That's 100%, take a photo!

Notes:

• There are 85 issues awaiting peer-review right now, this growing trend is not good!
• Next Monday, September 10th, we'll be releasing Moodle 3.1.14, 3.3.8, 3.4.5 and 3.5.2, minor releases including the latest bug and security fixes. From there, barely 2 months to the next major release: Moodle 3.6.
• While MDL-60901 (Moodle 3.6 requirements) is being reviewed for immediate incorporation upstream, MDL-63276 (Moodle 3.7 requirements) has been created for discussing things in advance.
• The Roadmap page has been recently updated with details about current projects for Moodle 3.6 and planning for Moodle 3.7. Time to take a look!

Hot topics:

• MDL-63101 : Fixed race condition in cache invalidation by event.
• MDL-63086 : Solved problem with non-existent RSS feeds.
• MDL-53024 : Multiple attempts for group submissions solved.
• MDL-62535 : Refactored advanced grading privacy implementation.
• And lots more in areas like privacy, web services, user management, gradebook...

Warm thanks:

• To you, beloved reader. With sincere admiration. Yes, to you! Because you deserve it!

Without land, how can you

have development of roads,

highways, townships, etc?

---- Kushal Pal Singh

Cold numbers:

9 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 87%, good one!

Notes:

• Alarm, alarm! : 82 issues awaiting peer-review. Alarm, alarm!
• Interested about the stuff behind our new testing infrastructure, these repos may be of your interest:
  • Nightlyscripts: the runner of all the automated tests (phpunit & behat for now), using our customized Docker images.
  • Nightlyjobs: the groovy stuff in charge of parametrizing and invoking (from Jenkins) the runner above.
  • local_ci: a collection of scripts in charge of performing various checks and automated actions for every commit ever integrated.
  • local_codechecker: In charge of validating the php coding style of the contributions.

And there are some more, all them Open Source too, of course. Because this is an Open Source project, what else?

OT: Some day it will be explained the reason behind the "nightly" naming of some repositories. Until then, all sort of theories are welcome, LOL.

Hot topics:

• MDL-62660 : Allow data export download links to expire.
• MDL-36255 : Better multilang support with various gradebook elements.
• MDL-63131 : Allow web service overrides.
• And lots more in areas like testing, deprecations, themes...

Warm thanks:

• To the Open Source Initiative (OSI), because it's 20 years since the "label" was created and the organization founded. Thanks for all your values and, very specially, many thanks for preventing the abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.

What is Open Source? you ask

as your blue eyes stare into mine.

What is Open Source? And you ask this to me?

Open Source… is you!

--- Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rhyme XXI - Adapted for this XXI century post.

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 77%, under average, but easy to improve.

Notes:

• With 79 issues awaiting peer-review right now, it's becoming urgent to get the list reduced. Help wanted!
• It has been decided (forum | tracker) that Bootstrap 2 based themes, Bootstrapbase, Clean and More, will be kept in core for Moodle 3.6 and will be completely removed for Moodle 3.7. Also, a new Classic theme will debut ASAP in the plugins database, providing the old navigation and blocks but built with the current Bootstrap 4 framework.
• Interested in learning the nuts and bolts of Moodle Learning Analytics? The Learning Analytics Working Group has launched the first in a series of workshops aimed at both developers (all levels welcome) and educators/researchers. See https://moodle.org/analytics for details.

Hot topics:

• MDL-62600 : Clearer separation of privacy officer and admin roles.
• MDL-63050 : Support Redis 4.0.
• MDL-62799 : Backport the tool_dataprivacy plugin to 3.3.x and 3.4.x
• MDL-59015 : Better use of the 'View more' button in the course overview block.
• And lots more in areas like assignments, administration, wiki, usability...

Warm thanks:

• To Karen Holland, from Moodle HQ because this week she has completed her first contribution to core. And we all are happy and grinning like a Cheshire cat because of that and many other reasons! Congrats!

I'm not playing a role.

I'm being myself,

whatever the hell that is.

---- Bea Arthur

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 6 delayed. That's 82% not bad.

Notes:

• We are near completing the Moodle 3.6 deprecations Epic. Time to check your code and move forward to the new alternatives.
• There are, right now, 64 issues awaiting peer-review. Any help there is really welcome.
• Is there any issue you collaborated with requiring Developers Documentation? It's very important for everybody else to have complete / updated docs. Once done, don't forget to remove the "dev_docs_required" label from the issues. TIA!
• Next minor/security releases are just 1 month away (September 10th). Good time to start planning what will be ready for Moodle 3.1.14, 3.3.8, 3.4.5 and 3.5.2.

Hot topics:

• MDL-62800 : The policy tool has been backported to 3.3.x and 3.4.x core.
• MDL-62619 : Privacy performance improvements fetching contexts.
• MDL-62996 : Solved a problem upgrading the dataprivacy tool from old versions.
• MDL-43334 : Better handling of headers cancelling backup operations.
• And lots more in areas like repositories, backup, themes, accesslib, libraries...

Warm thanks:

• To all the plugins reviewers and guardians, for keeping the fantastic 3rd party contributions in the Moodle Plugins Directory under control, reviewing and suggesting continuously how to improve them. More specifically, based on recent activity, huge thanks to Amaia Anabitarte, Bas Brands, Carlos Escobedo, Dan Marsden, David Mudrák, Ivan Matviyuk, Sara Arjona, Shamim Rezaie and Víctor Déniz. Keep spreading your knowledge, helping the community to find and use all those awesome plugins, well done!

The advancement and diffusion of knowledge

is the only guardian of true liberty.

---- James Madison

Cold, Hard, Numbers

Notes

• There are 80 issues waiting for Peer review. We are working hard to bring this down and we appreciate any help from the community.
• Deprecations are still ongoing and nearly complete. See MDL-54740 for more information.
• We are close to finalising the 3.6 roadmap and we should have more information soon.
• Don't forget about our guidelines for writing testing instructions. Following them really helps with our testing processes and ultimately helps us to get issues integrated more easily.

Hot topics

Warm thanks

• Chris
• Claudia
• Georgie
• Husveen
• Julia
• Kaye
• Mary; and
• Stew

• Brisbane, Australia - 24th - 26th September
• Cape Town, Africa - 11th - 12th October
• Denver, US - 29th - 30th October
• Hyderabad, India - 29th - 30th November

From the cold, and wet plains of Perth, to the Heatwaves spreading across Europe, happy Moodleing.

Cold numbers:

26 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 12 delayed - 92% success. Nice, but we'll try to do better to reduce the number of delayed issues!

Notes:

• 64 issues currently awaiting peer review. A bit better than the previous weeks but let's bring this further down!
• Deprecations for Moodle 3.6 are ongoing. To see what's going on, check out MDL-54740.
• Our 3.6 roadmap should be ready soon. Stay tuned!

Hot topics:

• MDL-60874 - Limit the number of search results on the new user enrolment control
• MDL-60826 - Prevent memory exhaustion during the creation or editing of calendar events
• MDL-62935 - Fix display of lesson slideshows in Boost
• MDL-62897 - Fix deletion of orphaned top question categories
• MDL-61652 - Allow configuration as to who can download subject access request data

Warm thanks:

• To Paul Greidanus -- Legendary Moodler, keeping our systems up and running.
• To Paul's newborn baby -- Keeping her dad up all night to keep our systems up and running. Congrats!
• To Paul's wife and daughters -- Keeping him inspired to keep our systems up and running.

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 18 delayed. That's 87% success, good one, but lots of delayed, running short of integration resources over the week, we'll try to catchup next cycle.

Notes:

• 70 issues awaiting peer-review, slightly better than last week, but still a long way for getting them processed. Any help is really welcome.
• Minor Moodle releases 3.1.13, 3.3.7, 3.4.4 and 3.5.1 happening in just one week (9th of July)!
• A new Code-checker version has been just released. It includes the latest PHPCompatibility sniffs plus some improvements handling fluid interfaces and indentation control.
• And a fun and interesting Developer meeting around the corner (5th of July). Don't miss it!

Hot topics:

• MDL-62698 : Prevent some uniqueness problems on upgrade.
• MDL-59047 : Fixed short-answer questions visualization in Boost.
• MDL-51080 : Better handling of MySQL ==> MariaDB transitions from various vendors.
• MDL-14274 : Add support for (if-then-else) conditions in grade calculations.
• MDL-62747 : Fixed a caching/performance problem with roles without capabilities.
• And lots more in areas like themes, privacy, xmldb...

Warm thanks:

To every single developer who has ever contributed to Moodle core. This all wouldn't be possible without your help! 668 big thanks, to 56 countries for those 112,233 commits. And counting!

Education is for improving the lives of others

and for leaving your community and world

better than you found it.

-- Marian Wright Edelman

Cold numbers:

30 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 86% success, good one.

Notes:

• 72 issues awaiting peer-review, lately we haven't been able to cope with all the awesome proposals arriving. Aiming to improve there, thanks for your patience and help!
• Just 3 days for Moodle DevJam @ Barcelona and 5 days for #MootES18 to kick off (27th of June). Getting close!
• Don't forget the incoming Developer meeting happening the 5th of July. Community contributions and topic proposals are welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-62709 : Messaging migration problems fixed.
• MDL-62658 : Notifications are now properly marked read.
• MDL-62614 : Privacy tags provider deletion fixed.
• MDL-62705 : Better support for order criteria in global search.
• MDL-57404 : Support # comments when configuring the IP blocker.
• And lots more in areas like privacy, themes, admin, installation...

Warm thanks:

To Adrian Greeve, analyst developer at Moodle HQ. Non stop peer reviewer, plugins guardian, gamification master... Many, many thanks for all the hard and fun work over the years. It's really easy and a pleasure to work with you!

And so with the sunshine

and the great bursts of leaves

growing on the trees,

just as things grow in fast movies,

I had that familiar conviction that life

was beginning over again with the summer.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 2 delayed. That's 82% success, getting better.

Notes:

• 12 days for #MootES18 to kick off (27th of June)!
• Just 3 weeks for the next minor/security releases (9th of July).
• It's always interesting to check your own issues waiting for dev docs and try to complete them.
• The list of issues awaiting peer-review is still considerable (67). Aiming to get it down ASAP. Help welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-62270 : Cron fails with privacy tasks on renamed admin sites.
• MDL-59980 : Unable to delete blocks on front page admin settings.
• MDL-62446 : Orphaned records in glossary module.
• MDL-62577 : PHPUnit rerun command to work with namespaces.
• MDL-62651 : Adhoc tasks cli runner.
• And lots more in areas like privacy, blocks, themes, course...

Warm thanks:

To Zig Tan, analyst developer at Moodle HQ. A really short name for a great guy! Many thanks for all your hard work with us over the last months and very best wishes for the new challenges you're about to start!

If you work hard and you work

for somebody who empowers you

and challenges you,

you'll be successful.

-- Hope Hicks

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 76% success, lower than usual, but somehow expected when the majority of them are new features, freed after the release of Moodle 3.5

Notes:

• After 3.5 and its on-sync period, we are back to normal weekly cycles, with today's one being the very first.
• Our primary goal was to process all the new features and improvements that were put on hold the previous weeks and, pretty much, it has been achieved, yay! Still, there was a hand of issues that were rejected to get some aspects reviewed, but sure they will find their way soon.
• The main goals and projects for next Moodle 3.6 release are being defined and decided these weeks. Soon, the roadmap will be updated accordingly.
• Time for opining / voting @ MDL-60901 (3.6 requirements) is over. In few hours we'll summarize them and start implementing the needed bits. Expect full final details in a week from now.
• Next minor/security releases are planned for the 9th of July, barely 4 weeks for them.
• There is a good number (73) of issues awaiting peer-review. Any help there is really welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-17943 : Resend confirmation email on login / forgotten password if needed.
• MDL-61702 : MariaDB >= 10.3.1 compatibility.
• MDL-61670 : Display timestamp of assignment uploaded files.
• MDL-62273 : New callback to control profile access.
• MDL-62225 : Keyboard shortcuts for pdf annotation buttons.
• And lots more in areas like themes, authentication, administration, install...

Warm thanks:

• To Paul Greidanus, Devops at Moodle HQ, coz today was Gauguin's birthday, and both share not only the name but also the exquisite proceeding within their specialities. Pure art!

It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

-- Maurice Denis

Edited: to fix some MDL codes that were incorrect.

Cold numbers:

14 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 0 delayed - 78.57% success.

Notes:

• Time to decide 3.6.0 requirements: MDL-60901
  
• Now we are on-sync. As always we have a new branch for 35, MOODLE_35_STABLE. Even if 35 already diverged from master we keep their codebases really similar.
  
• We bumped the required NodeJS version to lts/carbon which is v8.11.2 right now. You so you may need to upgrade your development NodeJS. If you use the same development environment for developing different applications you may be interested in using nvm
  
• Moodle 3.5.0 was released last week. A lot of effort was put into GDPR and other new projects so the list of issues waiting for peer review has grown a bit. Thanks for you patience.
  

Hot topics:

MDL-61893 Time to bump Node.js "Carbon" version again

MDL-61189 Calendar event descriptions not saving if using TinyMCE

MDL-62516 Request to delete forum data for a user will delete files of all users

MDL-62440 Participants page use of get_users_roles exhausts memory with many site-wide role assignments

Warm thanks:

To Bas Brands, a living legend, for updating boost theme to a stable Bootstrap release. More challenges ahead, keep up the good work.

Cold numbers:

50 issues have been successfully integrated, 0 rejected and 22 delayed - 100% success.

Notes:

• The code freeze has passed and we just started the continuous integration period https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Integration_Review#During_continuous_integration.2FFreeze.2FQA_period Integrators will now grab issues individually instead of pulling them all each Monday. New features and improvements that didn't make the freeze will be delayed.
• The Moodle 3.5 QA cycle will be starting very soon. If you'd like to be involved, please see the QA testing guide https://docs.moodle.org/dev/QA_testing
• MDL-60848 has been recently integrated. It is an atto plugin that allows users to record video and audio. Much voted issue, sure to be popular with teachers everywhere.

Hot topics:

• MDL-58697 Inconsistent view for assignment switched from group submission to non-group submission
  
• MDL-61869 Infer rendering of templatables with no render method
  
• MDL-60548 Cannot see email addresses, even when user's maildisplay setting allows it
  
• MDL-32585 SCORM: add new option to force new attempts
  
• MDL-60416 Support LTI Advantage 1.1
  
• MDL-50907 Antivirus: Implement antiviruses_scan_data function to scan data stream.
  
• MDL-60940 Add ability to force cleaning all user texts
  
• MDL-61298 Boost: Use the navigation node's icon in the flat_navigation template
  

Warm thanks:

To Farhan Karmali for all his contributions to the moodle community. Thanks

Cold numbers:

35 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 92% success, well done!

Notes:

• While you are reading this, Moodle 3.5 Freeze is (near) happening. More exactly, the gates for new features and improvements will be closed on Monday, 9th of April, at 06:00 UTC. By default any new issue of those types will be put on hold (integration_held label) until after release. Still it would be possible to request an reasoned unblock (by adding the unhold_requested label to them).
• Since freeze, there will be 5 weeks remaining for the next major release. QA cycle will commence in 1 week from now, we'll go thought the usual beta and release candidate states... all the usual craziness and fun of the period.
• Finally, any help is welcome along next weeks. Detecting issues, providing fixes, performing reviews, completing both the user and technical documentation... TIA! Together, is easier!

Hot topics:

• MDL-61724 : Allow downloading of resources with long filenames.
• MDL-61766 : Fix installation of sites with renamed admin folder.
• MDL-61256 : Global search now supports both section titles and summaries.
• MDL-60115 : Fix cancel button editing initial book chapter.
• MDL-61163 : Allow guests to view wikis in front page.
• And lots more in areas like privacy, questions, file picker, calendar...

Warm thanks:

• To Gladys Basiana, Rayna Mae Jayco, Janelle Barcega and Anna Carissa Sadia from UTPI, for their great work, every week, helping us with the testing of Moodle. Much appreciated!

We have a very active testing community

which people don't often think about

when you have open source.

-- Mitchell Baker

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 0 delayed - 90% success. Nice!

Notes:

• 11 days before code freeze!
• Please always remember to use the appropriate tracker labels (e.g. 'qa_test_required', 'dev_docs_required', 'api_change', 'ui_change', etc.) for your issues!
• GDPR documentation for plugin developers now available - https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Privacy_API and https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Subject_Access_Request_FAQ - thanks to Andrew Nicols with help from Adrian Greeve, Jake Dallimore, Sander Bangma, Jun Pataleta and Michael Hughes
• 64 issues currently awaiting peer review. Any help to bring this down to a much lower value would be super awesome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-53226 - Add moodle DB search engine
• MDL-36941 - Create new tables for messages and notifications and convert existing API to use these
• MDL-61364 - Update tag modal to allow managing of course and course context level tag instances
• MDL-60736 - Web Service language handling improvements for the mobile app

Warm thanks:

• To Tim Hunt, Marina Glancy, Carlos Escobedo, and to all of the awesome people doing amazing peer reviews for Moodle!

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 81% success, good one!

Notes:

• With the Moodle 3.5 LTS release planned to happen in 7 weeks (May 15th), and code freeze in just 2 (April 9th), it's a good moment to try to get as many as possible waiting for peer-review issues processed and sent to integration. Any help there is welcome!
• In order to facilitate testers do do their work, it's recommended to follow the testing instructions guide. Some small details really make the difference there.
• Don't skip the MoodleMoot IE UK 2018 Dev Jam this week - Wed 28 March 2018. It promises to be interesting!

Hot topics:

• MDL-61658 : Potential upgrade problem fixed.
• MDL-61678 : PHPUnit updated to 6.5.x
• MDL-61410 : Support for course level tags on question import and export.
• MDL-59434 : Context aware search and sorting of results.
• And lots more in areas like question banks, tags, privacy, libraries...

Warm thanks:

• To the eagerness to create, to be helpful; it should drive all our actions. Always.

Green is my favorite. And it's my favorite

because it's the color of my wife's eyes,

grass, trees, life, and money, and mother earth!

--Casper Van Dien

Cold numbers:

22 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 6 delayed. That's 85% success, slightly under average!

Notes:

• Next minor releases (3.1.11, 3.2.8, 3.3.5, 3.4.2) have been delayed by 1 week. Originally scheduled for next Monday (12th), they will be released on March 19th. That will allow us to polish various aspects of the GDPR implementation and other must-have functionalities like recaptcha v2 support (v1 support ends this month!).
• If you are using PostgreSQL as database backend, it's recommended to avoid upgrading to the latest versions (10.3, 9.6.8, 9.5.12, 9.4.17, 9.3.22) released a week ago (March 1st). We have found some problems, currently under investigation. More information available @ MDLSITE-5374.

Now, I normally would comment about the roadmap, peer-reviews, 3.6 requirements, some policy issues (like this or this), link to some other places and issues... but I'm in a hurry, so better next time.

Warm thanks:

• Today, to all of them. What else. ?? ?? ?? ?? Thanks!

My mother made me

truly appreciate women.

-- Drake

Cold numbers:

18 (11+7) issues have been successfully integrated with 7 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 72% success, not bad!

Notes:

• In 12 days from now, if everything goes ok, we'll be releasing next minor versions. Apart from the usual bugs solved and security fixes, the plan is to provide the basic stuff to allow everybody to start playing and preparing own plugins and customizations to be GDPR compliant.
• Do you like Barcelona? I love it. And Moodle? Me too. Then, why not?.
• Barely 10 weeks for Moodle 3.5 LTS (May 14th). Fun times coming! Keep yourself active, positive and collaborative.

Hot topics:

• MDL-61249 : Fix manual enrolment end date calculations.
• MDL-61394 : Allow external SCSS compilers (SaasC).
• MDL-61485 : Add a pre-signup callbak.
• MDL-58885 : Group support added to global search.
• And lots more in areas like cohorts, choice, questions...

Warm thanks:

• To the Sun, how could I miss it when previous thanks went to the Moon.

Every friend is to the other a sun, and a sunflower also.

He attracts and follows.

-- Jean Paul

Cold numbers:

14 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 93% success, yippie!

Notes:

• There are, right now, 78 issues awaiting peer-review. Would it be possible for you to hep us getting it down to 50 in a week?
• Take a look to Moodle's Roadmap, more specifically to the 3.5 one. It's a good summary of arriving changes.
• As you already should know, next May, the GDPR comes to effect, and it applies to a lot of systems, processes and, ultimately, people. Developers Included (yes we are, still, people. ). Please follow and participate in the ongoing discussion, linked docs and resources. Thanks!

Hot topics:

• MDL-61135 : Filter by tags in the question bank UI.
• MDL-61305 : Perf: Avoid parallel modinfo cache builds to happen.
• MDL-45837 : Create events for main letters and scales actions.
• MDL-61150 : Potentially breaking change: Moodle 3.5 and up will validate the PATH attribute of xmldb files. Please ensure it's correct in your plugins.
• And lots more in areas like external tool & LTI provider, libraries, admin...

Warm thanks:

• To the Moon, for being so awesome. And thanks for accompanying all these years, (near) every night, to this owl-developer. I love you!

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

-- Carl Sandburg