Moodle in English

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

Cold numbers:

31 issues have been successfully integrated, 7 rejected and 0 delayed - 81% success.

Notes:

• There are some ongoing discussion about deprecating themes based on Bootstrap 2; feel free to comment in MDL-58427 or MDL-60901
  
• As you may know theme Boost is based on an alpha version of Bootstrap 4; we want to include the latest stable Bootstrap 4 version in core; Bas is working on it: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-56511
  
• Mamma mia, 71 issues waiting for peer review

Hot topics:

• MDL-51189 Quiz - User Overrides - unable to edit override if quiz is not available to student
  
• MDL-52811 Capability to 'Force language' in Course settings
  
• MDL-57394 New Web Services for retrieving chat sessions
  
• MDL-61132 Create a "top" category in question bank
  
• MDL-61218 ChartJS tooltip not working after 3.4 upgrade
  
• MDL-61281 Adapt search_solr to PHP 7.2 (count() non-countable types)
  

Warm thanks:

To Jun Pataleta; because he silently became a very important element of the integration team; always helpful and proactive. Thanks for your hard work and for leading the integration of external testers into Moodle integration workflow. Arigatō Jun-san.

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 0 delayed - 83.33% success.

Notes:

• Say bye to an old friend called notify() MDL-50469
• The list of issues waiting for peer review is bulky. All help is welcomed. 
• Question Bank improvements issues are already waiting for peer review 
• In case anyone is interested in Moodle 3.5 requirements: MDL-59159

Hot topics:

• MDL-45367 Improve all the question type icons, and provide SVG versions
• MDL-61203 Allow uploading of profile picture to be used as badge criteria
  
• MDL-60812 Default role manual enrolment not working
  
• MDL-58006 Assignment 'Blind marking' status is not reset by 'Course reset'
  

Warm thanks:

To all devs who recently joined the Open Source Development team: Sara Arjona, Mihail Geshoski, Shamim Rezaie, Zig Tan and Bas Brands. Thanks all for joining, you are all awesome; looking forward to meet you in person.

Cold numbers:

21 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 88% success, nice one!

Notes:

• With 45 issues under peer-review the list is not looking specially long, but for sure there is room to improve there. Any help is welcome.
• While we are talking, next Moodle releases are being packaged. Say hi to all them: 3.4.1, 3.3.4. 3.2.7 and 3.1.10 will be generally available this Monday 15th.
• Major efforts and work is being put towards achieving the best possible compliance with the incoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It's highly recommended to follow the ongoing discussions, existing documents, watch videos... in order to know more about all its aspects and implications for your organization and to be ready in time.

Hot topics:

• MDL-61098 : Teachers now can edit or delete course webdav repositories.
• MDL-61061 : Fix "hideif" rules working with form groups.
• MDL-61050 : NTLM redirect regression fixed.
• MDL-61050 : Avoid unexpected assignment feedback deletion.
• And lots more in areas like calendar, repositories, testing, libraries...

Warm thanks:

• To Damyon Wiese, from HQ. True moodler, clever developer, sweet technical lead and awesome colleague. Looking forward to having you back ASAP.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal:

it is the courage to continue that counts.

-- Winston Churchill

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated, 5 rejected and 0 delayed - 77.2% success.

Notes:

• 44 issues currently awaiting peer review. Less than last week but more than next week (hopefully)

Hot topics:

• MDL-56246 Add sitewide default for grade export: include feedback
  
• MDL-61056 Feedback response navigation elements not displayed correctly in Boost
  
• MDL-60981 core_search: UI to gradually reindex a single area
  
• MDL-60971 Remote News Feed RSS should display pubDate
  
• MDL-60359 Bad layout of multiple choice questions in Boost theme
  

Warm thanks:

• To everybody who fought or fight for workers rights.

(edited, to fix incorrect original # of issues, apologies)

Cold numbers:

33 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 0 delayed - 94.3% success. Nice!

Notes:

• Moodle HQ has started planning on tackling the epic EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance issue. It seems it would be a great challenge for the HQ devs, but we will do our best! For more details, check out https://moodle.com/2017/12/21/moodle-gdpr-approach-plan.
• We are also looking for an awesome UX Designer to help us further improve Moodle and bring more empowerment to educators in improving our world! If you think this matches you (or someone you know), then check this out!
• 57 issues currently awaiting peer review. Let's make this number way lower!
• We also wish everyone happy holidays and safe travels during this festive season!

Hot topics:

• MDL-32113 - Raising the total number of digits for XMLDB_TYPE_NUMBER from 20 to 38.
• MDL-60793 - Moodle is now compatible with MySQL 8.0.3+.
• MDL-50666 - Configuring which roles a certain role can view
• MDL-60061 - SCORM now supports drag and drop on the Calendar

Warm thanks:

• To Moodle HQ's Open Source Development Coordinator Sander Bangma. He only started last November, but he's already been doing a good job coordinating HQ's GDPR plans, among other HQ dev projects!

Cold numbers:

34 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 89% success, nice one!

Notes:

• With 57 issues under peer-review the list has been greatly reduced over the last week... still we need to get it further down. Any help is welcome!
• We are delaying next minor releases by 1 week, from January 8th to January 15th, in a preventive way, because of all the public holidays and leaves, making the 2 previous weeks really short in both time and resources. Aiming to better and easier releases for everybody with the move.
• Since some weeks ago we are outsourcing our manual testing of integrated issues to an external company, towards allowing developers to stay more concentrated on their awesome solutions and fixes. So far, around the 40% of the testing load is already being handled externally. Let's see how the initiative evolves!

Hot topics:

• MDL-60759 : compatibility with Solr 7.x added.
• MDL-60043 : performance improvements in sites with many overrides.
• MDL-54106 : make delete unconfirmed users to work.
• MDL-45500 : enable the ability of uninstalling grading plugins.
• And lots more in areas like unit tests, competencies, themes, calendar, lesson...

Warm thanks:

• To Mark Nelson, from HQ, an absolute Moodle & Snow legend. For all these years giving us so much, with your personality, your mood, your way... don't change ever, please! Thanks!

The characteristics of an authentically

empowered personality are humbleness,

clarity, forgiveness and love.

-- Gary Zukav

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 0 delayed - 82.6% success

Notes:

• The requirements for Moodle 3.5 has been decided.
• We'd also like to take this opportunity to welcome our new Moodle HQ developer, Zig Tan! We're very excited to work with you!
• Last week, our legendary developer Adrian Greeve attended #GamificationEurope. Looking forward to the cool ideas he'll bring back!
• 82 issues currently awaiting peer review. Woah, that's quite a lot. Let's bring this number down!

Hot topics:

• MDL-59159 - Decide Moodle 3.5 requirements and push them to environment.xml 
• MDL-59875 - Allow badges as criteria for other badges
• MDL-37757 - Turning off Server Files Repository breaks courses that used it
• MDL-34161 - Fix LTI backup and restore to support course and site tools and submissions

Warm thanks:

• To Marina Glancy, Tim Lock, and Greg Faller for all their hard work towards fixing the LTI backup/restore issue. That highly-voted issue has been out for years and it's so great that it has been finally integrated into core. This is a big win for the community! You all rock!

Cold numbers:

26 issues have been successfully integrated, 1 rejected and 0 delayed - 96% success.

Notes:

• On-sync period is over; Yesterday master (future 3.5) and 3.4 branch versions diverged so master branch is now open to improvements and new features
  
• Moodle HQ developers (sometimes with help from other HQ teams) have always been the ones testing all issues that got integrated into Moodle. This last cycle we got help from a group of external testers so HQ developers have more time to focus on development and peer reviewing. It went quite well and they will continue helping us so thanks for your patience and sorry for any possible inconvenience. Thanks Jun Pataleta for coordinating communications between teams and for the smooth transition.
  
• Requirements for Moodle 3.5 are being decided and you have not yet added your +1 / -1?? Now it is a good time to do it.
  
• We included a new tiny note in the peer reviewing checklist: verify that the related component maintainers, if known, have participated and are aware of the issue (as assignee, or existing comments...). If they have not, please perform a friendly @mention to make them aware about the issue. (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/index.php?title=Peer_reviewing&type=revision&diff=53421&oldid=53135)
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-27886 backup_general_users forbids all users to backup user data
  
• MDL-59512 Can't connect a system account to OAuth 2 services that only support client authentication via Basic Auth
  
• MDL-60436 Performance regression in block_manager::load_blocks()
  
• MDL-58817 LTI icons are overwritten
  

Warm thanks:

To Andrew Nicols and David Mudrák; they have been chosen as most helpful HQ developers for 3.4 release. Thanks you! For all your past, present and future work.

Cold numbers

10 issues have been successfully integrated, with 4 rejected and 2 delayed.

Notes

• First and foremost, Moodle 3.4 stable has landed! We've all been working really hard, and are happy to reach this milestone. Well done everyone! You can check out the release notes.
  
• We're now approaching the end of the first week of a two week on-sync period.
  
• Here at HQ, we're all very excited to welcome our newest developers, Mihail, Sara and Shamim to the team. It's been a busy month and also joining us here at HQ is our new Open Source Development Coordinator, Sander and our People and Culture Coordinator, Holly.  They're already making an impact, so well done guys. It's great to have you on board!
  

Hot Topics

• MDL-60355: Support for playing restricted Vimeo videos backported to Moodle 3.3 for use with the Moodle Mobile app.
  
• MDL-60789: Workshop titles correctly validated to 255 chars or less.
  
• MDL-60675: Fixed exception during navigation of analytics models.
  

Warm thanks

To everyone who helped out with QA testing for the 3.4 release. This is a big job, and it takes a lot of man hours to get us over the line. We're very grateful for all the help!

Cold numbers:

124 issues have been successfully integrated with 8 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 94% success, not bad at all, specially given the extra pressure caused by freeze and other due dates.

Notes:

• Moodle 3.4 beta has been released some hours ago. That's an important step in the process, meaning that we don't accept any new feature or improvement unrelated with the release. In other words, we consider the code feature complete (again, note a few exceptions may happen).
• The QA cycle is advancing nicely, surely we'll need some help there with tests requiring special server configurations and integrations with other systems. Thanks everybody!
• The new release is scheduled for November 13th, that's only 2.5 weeks away!
• Soon, release notes, upgrade details and other important bits of information and docs will be generated and shared.
• Don't forget to take a look to MDL-59159 (Moodle 3.5 LTS requirements). Everything about it should be decided before December. Any idea, opinion, comment... there is welcome.

Hot topics:

• MDL-60279 : preparing Moode for PHP 7.2.
• MDL-59100 : towards supporting MySQL 8.0 / MariaDB 10.2.
• MDL-58533 : library upgrades near complete.
• MDL-60456 : nodejs (v8.7.0) and npm (5.4.2) are now the minimum recommended versions for all stable branches. To be kept stable (locked) for the next months. Consider using nvm for easy handling of multiple versions.
• MDL-58605 : clean browser cache between tests.
• And lots more everywhere!

Warm thanks:

• To John Okely, virtually real, educated moodler, game changer, meetings & conferences master, thanks for everything!

You're only as good as your last haircut.

-- Fran Lebowitz

Edited: s/MySQL 5.8/MySQL 8.0, thanks Matteo!

Cold numbers:

40 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 19 delayed. That's 100% success, but with an obvious trick, lots of delayed issues. We'll try to reduce them down to zero along the next 2 weeks.

Notes:

• Remember our "Moodle Development" public calendar, where all the main events (releases, freeze, QA testing, countdowns...) use to be. Of course, there is also an ical link to get subscribed to it. Finally, here there is a brief preview of the main next dates to be considered:
  • Practically now (October 9th), Moodle 3.4 code freeze will happen. That's the last opportunity to accept new features or improvements. Over the next 5 weeks well be looking to bug fixes aiming to a stable and consistent release.
  • In one week (October 16th) the QA cycle will begin. It will be announced soon with more details.
  • Five weeks from now (November 13th) and, if there aren't last-minute surprises, all the testing has been completed with success, and the Moon continues out there, the best release ever, Moodle 3.4, will happen.
  • And, immediately after that, we'll start looking forward to the next one, Moodle 3.5 (May 2018). Oh, my!
• Don't forget to proactively label the issues when reporting, triaging, fixing, integrating or testing them. It's always better to label in excess than missing them.
• These are busy weeks coming, so try to be relaxed and rest as well as possible. Patience, illusion and happiness are required, be warned!

Hot topics:

• MDL-59913 : Allow search on non-enrolled courses.
• MDL-60234 : Disable vendor/node_modules admin warnings via config.
• MDL-59890 : Course category calendar events now possible.
• MDL-33174 : Curl requests now include original file name.
• MDL-58533 : Update 3rd part libraries for Moodle 3.4.
• MDL-59236 : Workshop WS coverage almost done.
• And lots more in areas like calendar, themes, analytics, acceptance tests, quizzes...

Warm thanks:

• To Dan Poltawski, one of those truly awesome people, really hard to find nowadays out there. Just... thanks!

You are way awesome

than you think you are.

Don't forget about

your awesomeness today

-- Janna Cachola

Cold numbers

18 issues successfully integrated, with 1 rejected and 1 delayed. That's a better than 94% conversion rate! 

Notes

• Moodle Moot AU took place this week in Sydney. Checkout #MootAU17 or @moodle for some of the highlights!
• The code freeze for Moodle 3.4 release is fast approaching on the 9th of October. 

Hot topics

• MDL-54540 - LTI activities now support fullscreen
• MDL-59780 - Fix for MathJax URLs lost during upgrade
• MDL-59645 - Flickr repository support restored
• MDL-57115 - Block messages moved out of core and towards the plugins db

Warm thanks

Special mention to Ankit Agarwal for his tireless efforts working on the heavy duty stable bugs, whilst maintaining his own plugins and supporting others in getting theirs across the line. Keep up the great work, mate! 

Cold numbers

25 issues have been successfully integrated, with 2 rejected and 4 delayed - 93% success, nice!

Notes

• MoodleMoot Australia begins next week in Sydney, ideas for hackfest topics are open - get involved!
• The moodle-docker project has had some significant changes this week. VNC inspection of running selenium sessions, PHP versions are now controlled by environment variables and documentation has been improved. Please contribute on the issues and pull requests there

Hot topics

• MDL-60094 - Add CLI script to kill all sessions
• MDL-53169 - Provide a way to retrieve all courses a user can potentially access.
• MDL-37810 - Custom Roles: Not listed in Current Role drop-down on Participants list page, cannot put into Groups

Warm thanks

As my last integration exposed I would like to thank everyone at Moodle HQ who I’ve worked with over the last 5 years…

A special mention to David Monllaó Olivé. The man who brought the Moodle world core_analytics, tool_behat, core_search celebrated the arrival of his son Fidel last week! Congratulations to David and Carmen and thank you for all your support over these years!

All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves.

-- Amelia Barr

Cold numbers

30 issues have been successfully integrated, with 9 rejected and 1 delayed - 83% success.

Notes

• Travis results on MySQL are sadly broken at the present time, a fix is coming in MDL-60035
• Do you know about Callbacks documentation? Please help us to keep the list of callbacks in Moodle up to date! Thanks to Marina Glancy for helping get this information in one place
• The moodle-docker , moodle-php-apache, moodle-db-mssql and moodle-db-oracle repositories have all been moved to the Moodle HQ organisation. If using the images directly you will need to update your docker pull commands to use the new location on docker hub https://hub.docker.com/u/moodlehq/. Please comment on repository move issue if any problems are encountered.

Hot topics

• MDL-59834 - Indexing of personal messages of meanwhile deleted user does not fail gracefully
• MDL-59786 - Strengthen “Students at risk of dropping out” requirements to accept courses and student enrolments
• MDL-59753 - Convert calendar course selector to AJAX

Warm thanks

To Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) for many many years of support to Moodle developers around the globe - the knight in shining armour!

Cold numbers:

39 issues have been successfully integrated, 1 rejected and 0 delayed - 97.5% success, sweet!

Notes:

• Can you believe it's already been a little more than 15 years since Moodle 1.0 was released? Moodle is very similar to wine, it just gets better with age!
• It's already September! Did you know that in the Philippines, September marks the beginning of Christmas season? In Australia, it marks the beginning of Spring. For the Moodle community in AU this year, it means that MoodleMoot Australia 2017 is just around the corner! Have you registered yet?
• 18 issues currently awaiting peer review. Not bad, but we can definitely do better. Go, go, go!

Hot topics:

More follow-ups/bug fixes/improvements for the following new features have landed:

• Calendar improvements
  • MDL-59394 - Add support for drag/drop of calendar events between different months
  • MDL-59713 - Ability to create a new event by clicking on an empty section of a day in the calendar
• Merge course participants and enrolled users pages
  • MDL-59828 - Improved rendering of the course participants page's filter control
  • MDL-59822 and MDL-59823 - Fixes for bulk enrollment actions in the course participants page
• Analytics
  • MDL-59030 - Add course information indicators
  • MDL-59265 - Guarantee 3rd parties can add machine learning backends for regression
  • MDL-59779 - Reduce the number of DB queries during execution of community of inquiry indicators

... and so much more!

Warm thanks:

• To everyone in the Moodle community! Thanks for all of your continued support and contributions to Moodle throughout this past 15 years. Let's make Moodle much more awesome!

Cold numbers:

32 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 3 times 100% success this month, any bet about September?

Notes:

• Remember our "Moodle Development" public calendar, where all the main events (releases, freeze, QA testing, countdowns...) use to be. Of course, there is also an ical link to get subscribed to it. Finally, here there is a brief preview of the main next dates to be considered:
  • In 2 weeks (September 11th), we'll be releasing next minor releases with latest bug and security issues fixed.
  • In 6 weeks (October 9th), Moodle 3.4 code freeze will happen. One week later its QA cycle will begin.
  • In 11 weeks (November 13th), if everything is working as expected, Moodle 3.4 will be released.
  • Time flies, fun!
• Don't forget to proactively label the issues when reporting, triaging, fixing, integrating or testing them. There are a number of processes hanging of those labels (user and dev documentation, release notes...) and it's always better to label in excess than missing them.
• Right now there are 41 issues awaiting peer review, let's try to process at very least all those being good candidates for 3.4.

Hot topics:

• MDL-57412 : Make the linked course sections setting to work consistently (esp. under Boost themes).
• MDL-57246 : Fix broken page problem visiting forums.
• MDL-57775 : xmlrpc client/encode problems solved.
• MDL-59784 (and others) : Fixed various problems with modals that were leading to incorrect behaviors and random testing failures.
• And lots more in areas like calendar, user management, analytics, javascript, forms library...

Warm thanks:

• To Cameron Ball, from Moodle HQ. Coding warlock, functional alchemist, testing virtuoso, algorithm illusionist. Thanks!

Innovation is so hard and so frustrating;

it takes the intersections of people with

courage, vision, and resources.

-- Dean Kamen

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 0 delayed. That's 100% success, perfection exists! (sure there is some hidden regression there, lol).

Notes:

• Halfway through Moodle 3.4 (Nov. 2017) development. Lots of usable awesomeness coming.
• Right now there are 46 issues awaiting peer review, any help is welcome there.
• Some people likes rainbow release notes (full of exclamations, questions, jokes, telling you a secret...) , others just black and white ones (formal, lists, neutral, informative...). Which ones do you prefer?

Hot topics:

• MDL-59785 : Fixed book's activity completion.
• MDL-59667 : Date picker incorrect positioning on modals.
• MDL-59388 : Convert calendar views to templates system.
• MDL-53537 : Creating events on backup
• And lots more in areas like web services, tests, usability, participants page...

Warm hugs:

• To Barcelona and all the people making their life there. Beautiful, inspiring, warm, modern, universal, unbreakable!

I wrote every day between

the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped

because I went to Barcelona,

where life was too exciting to write.

-- Colm Tóibín

Cold numbers

34 issues have been successfully integrated, with none rejected, and 1 delayed - 100% success, woot!

Notes

• The calendar project is coming along well, with creation and edit of calendar events now being performed in a modal You can also visit the Prototype Site to see some of the progress so far;
• The enrolments page is in the process of being merged with the participants page, and simplified to improve usability and user experience. Take a look at the changes so far.
• Work is underway to support MariaDB 10.2 and MySQL 8. Perhaps you can help fix some of the issues identified so far in MDL-59098;
• We are still seeking opinions on MDL-57365 (When sorting by a column in grader then refreshing the page, it keeps inverting the sort order);

Hot topics

• MDL-57546: YouTube Filter now supported links from m.youtube.com
• MDL-57259: Adding a call to set_url() in some web services which were polluting logs
• MDL-59382: Create calendar event quick add/edit
• MDL-59564: Bulk editing of user enrolment status, and dates
• MDL-59582: Prepare Moodle for NodeJS 8.2.0
• MDL-59518: Course reset should not change dates of user data

Warm thanks

To our hard-working, and dedicated Events Co-ordinator and Admin Assistant, Frances Le Page. One of the key faces behind all Moodle HQ Moot organisation.

Cold numbers

29 issues have been successfully integrated, with 1 rejected and 2 delayed - 97% success, nice!

Notes

• The Analytics API (previous versions released separately from core as project inspire plugin) has been integrated this week into core (MDL-57791), still a long road ahead but the key pieces are in place. This API acts as a bridge between Moodle and machine learning algorithms. It allows us to get predictions based on Moodle past data, generate insights for Moodle users from these predictions and suggest them actions. As part of MDL-57791 we introduce 2 built-in models as examples: "Students at risk of dropping out of courses" and "Courses with no teaching". If you are keen to contribute data to improve these built-in models accuracy please enrol in Project Inspire course. This API introduces some new concepts in Moodleland (I would recommend you to read the MDocs page to get an overall idea if you are interested) and although its more direct use is for Learning Analytics it is a general purpose API and can also be used to solve classical supervised learning problems like spammers detection.
• Workshop module web services started to land in master during these weeks, more to come: MDL-59236
• Any opinion on MDL-57365 (When sorting by a column in grader then refreshing the page, it keeps inverting the sort order.) would be appreciated
• Call for volunteers in MDL-53226 (Add moodle DB search engine)

Hot topics

• MDL-57698: Backup and restore can cause deadlock with sqlsrv driver
  
• MDL-59561: Upgrade to 3.3 fails because of very long index in mdl_question_categories on MariaDB in utf8mb4_general_ci
  
• MDL-59485: Add missing LTI capabilities
  
• MDL-57945: Upgrade stylelint to 8.0.0
  
• MDL-57791: Implement an analytics engine in Moodle
  
• MDL-56751: Create new security setting to configure the expiration time of tokens created via login/token.php or tool/mobile/launch.php
  

Warm thanks

Cold numbers

31 issues have been successfully integrated, with 1 rejected and 1 delayed - 97% success, nice!

Notes

• Work has started to provide compatibility with a chrome native mink driver for behat testing, see MDL-58948 and MDL-59479 - please contribute if you'd like to see this become a fully supported driver
• Did you know the roadmap of work for Moodle 3.4 -work continues apace

Hot topics

• MDL-59460 - Make Subscription mode setting for forums configurable
• MDL-55912 - User details incorrect when blind marking students
• MDL-50925 - Moving some auth plugins to plugins repo
• MDL-59150 - Provide a way to pre-compile all site themes during CLI upgrade and install
• MDL-58119 - Cache-Control: immutable backported to Moodle 3.2.5
• MDL-57476 - Hooks into the file API

Warm thanks

To Vladimir Zhirov for contributing fixes to Moodle core, thanks!

Cold numbers

29 issues have been successfully integrated, with 1 rejected and 3 delayed - 96% success

Notes

• MDL-57432 has been integrated this week. Master branch now requires PHP 7.0.0, it is a good time to upgrade or at least to install it alongside PHP 5
• Great job reducing the list of issues waiting for peer review, there are still a few issues to reduce the counter to zero: https://tracker.moodle.org/issues/?filter=13607
• Moodle 3.4 new developments started landing these weeks (calendar UI, participations page improvements...) as well as other nice improvements in global search thanks to Sam Marshall from The Open University
  

Hot topics

• MDL-57432 Decide Moodle 3.4 requirements and push them to environment.xml (due date: 29/05/2017)
  
• MDL-59383 Create calendar event Summary dialogue
  
• MDL-59368 Add a groups column to the participants page
  
• MDL-58957 Global search: Make it possible to search blocks
  
• MDL-59039 Global search: Allow partial indexing (in scheduled task)
  
• MDL-58544 Add option to trust email of an oauth provider
  
• MDL-59468 install should not require any database
  

Warm thanks

To Rajesh Taneja and Frédéric Massart who recently left Moodle HQ. Thanks for your great contributions over the years. All the best for the future. 

Cold numbers

29 issues have been successfully integrated, with 4 rejected and 3 delayed - 88% success

Notes

• Requirements for Moodle 3.4 have been decided. We are raising our PHP minimum requirement to 7.0.0 and raising the intl extension to required, from recommended. (MDL-57432)
• Various improvements are being carried out to CSS compilation and serving mechanics in Epic MDL-59122 - wide early testing of these changes would be really appreciated
• There is updated coding style guidance for promises in Javascript. https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Javascript/Coding_Style#Promises

Hot topics

• MDL-26976 - Display space used in My Private Files
• MDL-58310 - Error occurs whenever in progress ajax request is cancelled (random "undefined" popup)
• MDL-58729 - Full unicode support conversion impractically slow
• MDL-59005 - Directory activity: wrong file encoding after extraction of zip file with Cyrillic file names

Warm thanks

To Luca Bösch for many great fixes to Moodle core, thanks!

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected during this last cycle - 86% success.

Notes:

• The list of callbacks (hooks, extension points or whatever nomenclature you want to use) is now documented in the dev docs page dev/Callbacks. Please help us ensure it's kept accurate and useful
• Compatibility changes in behat are now documented at dev/Acceptance_testing/Compatibility_changes
• This week brings an end to the Moodle 3.3 on-sync period and improvements/new features for Moodle 3.4 will start being integrated from next week. Held issues from the freeze and on-sync period will be unheld and integrated
• Do you object to raising the minimum PHP version to 7.0.x in Moodle 3.4? Only a few days left to comment on MDL-57432 about that!

Hot topics:

• MDL-57957 - In assignment without grade, feedback files are not shown to students
• MDL-59011 - Restore bug in Moodle 3.3
• MDL-58577 - In statistics report, multilang for role names is not supported in headers

Warm thanks:

To Sam Marshall (Open University) for more than 11 great years of improving Moodle - thanks!

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 1 delayed during this last cycle - 90.48% success.

Notes:

• Moodle 3.3 was released last week, the next 3.3 branch release (Moodle 3.3.1) is scheduled for 10th July
  
• Important: Ongoing discussions in MDL-57432 about requiring PHP 7.x branch for Moodle 3.4 as well as other server requirements
  
• Peer reviews welcomed: https://tracker.moodle.org/issues/?filter=13607
  

Hot topics:

• Many interesting stuff integrating during the last weeks https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_3.3_release_notes
  
• MDL-58656 course competencies report can throw errors due to scales.
  
• MDL-57558 ldap_get_entries_moodle() doesn't lowercase attribute names used as keys in the returned array.
  
• MDL-58947 Search: Label URLs not correctly calculated
  

Warm thanks:

For the 2 new members of the integration team: Jun Pataleta and Jake Dallimore. Heavy duty machines. Thanks for everything.

Cold numbers:

9 issues have been successfully integrated, 1 rejected and 2 delayed - 90% success.

Notes:

- Last week was a busy week following on from a well deserved Easter break for most people.

- This now marks the second beta release for Moodle 3.3

- Continuous integration is still underway as we shoot towards the upcoming release candidate.

Hot topics:

- LDAP authentication stuck in forced password change loop

- Clarify UX for teachers when switching workshop stages

Warm thanks:

A big thank you to everyone who's been helping with the QA testing for Moodle 3.3. Without your continued support, the release would certainly take a lot longer to arrive!

Cold numbers: 

29 issues have been successfully integrated, 1 rejected and 3 delayed - 96% success.

Notes:

• This week, the new and improved My Overview block has landed in master through MDL-55611! Feel free to check it out and report any issues in the follow-up epic MDL-58384.
  
• New OAuth2 Services feature (MDL-58220) that provides users authenticated access to external services, such as Google Drive, Office 365, Facebook, etc., as the current user or using a system account.
  
• Another major feature for Moodle 3.3 is expected to land next week. Watch out for bulk editing of activity completion in MDL-58138!
• Continuous integration commences next week!
  

• MDL-55611 - MyOverview block
  
• MDL-58220 - Implement Better office integrations project 
  
• Others:
  
  • Jake Dallimore and yours truly integrated our first issues this week! (Yay!) It felt awesome and scary at the same time. 
    

• To Moodle HQ's iTeam for their guidance to Moodle HQ's new integrators!
  
• To Damyon Wiese and the rest of Moodle HQ's Project Team for a job well done in making the My Overview block and the new OAuth2 Services feature.
  

Cold numbers:

48 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 5 delayed - 92% success.

Notes:

• Font Awesome has been integrated to Moodle in MDL-40759 for replacing many icons with this open source font icon set. This change will make quite a significant visual difference to Moodle. It is not yet perfect and it is hoped that now the change is in master, more feedback and changes to icons will be gathered. Please report problems and follow up issues in epic MDL-58354. Documentation about this change can be found at https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_icons#Font_awesome_icons
• Moodle 3.2.2 and associated pointed releases included a number of security fixes, CVE-2017-2641 was a particularly nasty issue which an exploit scenario is getting a lot of publicity on the web. Please update your sites to protect against this with some urgency. Forum thread Applying patch to protect against CVE-2017-2641 contains some good information.
• Next week will be a bumper Integration week with some major 3.3 features landing for integration (MDL-55611 MDL-58220), we appreciate your patience in these busier times - many issues have been delayed over the last few weeks.
• Moodle HQ are recruiting developers, experienced Moodle developers are particularly welcomed!
• Code freeze starts 3rd April for Moodle 3.3 - get ready!

Hot topics

• MDL-40759 - Use the Font Awesome icon font for all icons in Moodle
• MDL-57429 - Openbadges backpack connection broken on Moodle
• MDL-34859 - General Restore Defaults
• MDL-57162 - Option to enable app install banners for the Android mobile app
• MDL-57796/ MDL-57397 - Many many new webservices for mod_lesson and and mod_feedback

Warm thanks:

To Juan Leyva, Moodle Mobile App Lead, for all work on the mobile app, his plugins and particularly this week many many web services and hard work rationalising apis for use by the app, thanks!

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 4 delayed. That's 90% success, nice one!

Notes:

• Next Monday, March 13th, we'll be releasing a number of minor/security releases for the 27, 30, 31 and 32 stable branches of Moodle.
• Immediately after the minors, the final countdown towards Moodle 3.3 will start: finishing developments (freeze happening on April 3rd - also Monday), fixing bugs, testing... everything should be done and ready for releasing on May the 2nd, Monday too, of course.
• Right now here are 28 issues awaiting peer review. Please help reducing the list. Let's see how many are remaining next… Monday.

Hot topics:

• MDL-51833 : Avoid event monitor load to happen on all pages.
• MDL-48228 : Full Unicode support for MySQL and MariaDB.
• MDL-55980 : Run scheduled tasks from web.
• MDL-53978 : Add plugin callbacks @ strategic points of page rendering.
• And lots more in areas like themes, performance, libraries, accessibility...

Warm thanks:

• To Mondays for being one of my fav. days of the week. Exactly my 7th favorite.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time.

You have exactly the same number of

hours per day that were given to

Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo,

Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci,

Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.

-- H. Jackson Brown Jr.

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 3 delayed - 90% success.

Notes:

• This week MDL-46375 landed, allowing Moodle's file pool to be implemented on non-posix filesystems (e.g. cloud-based systems like S3) by creating a new file_system class. See https://docs.moodle.org/dev/File_System_API#Defining_a_new_filesystem and kick the tires for us so we can sure this API is in the best possible shape at 3.3 release.
• Work is ongoing for a new improved dashboard which was voted on by the Moodle User Association (MUA), follow along in MDL-55611 and see https://docs.moodle.org/dev/My_course_overview_improvements
• Font awesome is coming with better core support, learn more at the Font awesome discussion in the themes forum

Hot topics:

• MDL-4782 - allow resources/activities to be hidden but available/active
• MDL-57896 - cli script to get/set configuration options
• MDL-57810 - Better page progressive loading experience on NGINX
• MDL-57766 - Marker allocation does not work on assignment grader page

Warm thanks:

To Paul Greidanus, Devops at Moodle HQ and constantly working in the background to keep things running smoothly, thanks!

Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.

-- Jimi Hendrix

Cold numbers:

14 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 2 delayed - 87.5% success

Notes:

• setExpectedExceptions is deprecated, more info in MDL-57853
• If anyone feels like reviewing code you can find a list of awesome issues waiting to be peer reviewed 
• Do the plugins you maintain use YUI? Check out https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=346520

Hot topics:

• MDL-57370 Notifications and messages nav popovers slow or unresponsive
  
• MDL-57587 Feedback images when reviewing a quiz attempt not showing
  
• MDL-57316 If filter_mediaplugins is disabled, video.js is not working in resources
  
• MDL-56954 Course management page requires styling in Boost

Warm thanks:

To all 3rd party plugin developers. Moodle core is flexible (and now with Boost theme even beautiful) but you are the ones making Moodle special. Thanks for sharing your plugins with the community.

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 2 delayed - 89% success.

Notes:

• Interested in better integrations with Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365? A project will begin development shortly to improve these office integrations. Damyon Wiese has published the requirements doc Better Office Integrations 3.3 and comments are welcomed on the office integrations forum thread
• The Moodle dev chat moved yesterday from jabber to telegram, all developers are welcome! Come join the 55 of already there in https://telegram.me/moodledev
• Rex Lorenzo has posted about an improvement that UCLA have made to the activity chooser to allow teachers to simplify the choices, join the discussion if you'd like to see this in core
• MoodleMoot UK and Ireland 2017 is taking place in London in April and includes a dev jam! It would be great to meet some of you there - registrations are open now!

Hot topics:

• MDL-36233 - For teacher - course overview block inconsistently lists "Submissions not graded" link for assignments
• MDL-57638 - block_rss_client does not respect skiptime and skipuntil values
• MDL-57782 - Welcome e-mails are sent even when 'sendcoursewelcomemessage' is set to 'no'
• MDL-54628 - Add the creation of links to the individual commands suggested in parallel executions

Warm thanks:

To Jake Dallimore Moodle HQ Developer, who has jumped straight into fixing the most narly of Moodle bugs without a break in his stride. Kudos!

Cold numbers:

46 issues have been successfully integrated along the last 2 weeks with 3 rejected and 6 delayed. That's 94% success, sup!

Notes:

• After a good number of iterations, discussions, it was decided to close won't fix the proposal for a new hooks API. Instead we'll be looking towards adding new hooking points at interesting places and performing small improvements to existing APIs along the time. Don't forget to take a look to the Communication Between Components doc that pretty much defines how all interactions between Moodle components should be.
• In the other side, persistent and exporter APIs have been moved from the competencies API to core, becoming globally available. Read about them and look for current uses. It's nice stuff.
• Are you, anywhere in the world, a coding ninja with Moodle experience? Interested into working working with us @ HQ? Take a look to this job offer.
• Right now there are 29 issues awaiting peer review, any help is welcome there.

Hot topics:

• MDL-57690, MDL-57488... : Getting rid/replacing, when possible, Yui stuff, aiming to, slowly, marching towards js modules.
• MDL-57570, MDL-57655... : Adding the igbinary serializer into different places (redis and static cache store, redis session handler...).
• MDL-57655 : Videojs/Youtube loading improvements.
• MDL-57677 : Fixed authorship of edited forum posts.
• MDL-57515 : Improvements to resources having many files.
• And lots more in areas like web services, forums, behat tests, assignments...

Warm thanks:

• To Simey Lameze from HQ. And his wife! Have been some good months (October 2016) since they got married, but better later than never, congrats! And keep the hard work with Moodle going!

Functional programming combines

the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics

with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics.

---- xkcd

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated, with 4 rejected - 78% success, quite some difference to the 80 per week at the tail end of the last release cycle!

Notes:

• This week Linting of behat .feature files landed into master using gherkin-lint and run automatically using grunt. At the moment we use it ensure consistent indentaion and avoid duplicate names, but more lint rules may be enabled in future

• Are you using calendar_event_hook() - it is due to be removed in 3.3, see Removal of calendar_event_hook().

• Active record, in Moodle? Maybe! See the branch heading to integration in MDL-57273 and dev docs: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Persistent

• Do you know on some pages we include YUI2, YUI3, and jQuery? As we make Moodle more dynamic we need to reduce this client-side bloat. It would be great to reduce our depdencies on legacy JS, especially for things that can have a presence on every page. Perhaps you can help out with reducing javascript-static.js (MDL-57470) or making YUI2 finally disapear (MDL-36373)? Think about greping your add-on plugins and try modernising them before we force your hand with a depreciation, it might mean you can contribute a common helper that reduces the work for other developers, every little helps!

• Today 3 integrators will be gathering in spain for a (rare and relatively impromptu) in-person meeting til Sunday, we aim to discuss various improvements to integration infrastructure, upcoming Moodle development areas and our role in supporting and interacting with developers. If you think there is something we should discuss, please do get in touch

Hot topics:

• MDL-53367 - Importing a forum with auto subscription does not subscribe current users
• MDL-57427 - Moodle always enables performance debugging in MUC
• MDL-56519 - Lint .feature files
• MDL-40132 - Using compare rule results in fatal error in getValidationScript function
• MDL-55461 - [atto_equation] Repeating insertion from predefined buttons does not place them where the cursor is set

Warm thanks:

To Dan Marsden, thanked for contributing to Moodle in too many ways to mention, but most recently for his work on maintaining mod_scorm and fantastic contribution as a Plugins Guardian helping to support our healthy community of add-on developers.

It's been some time since we our last update - apologies for the interupation and thanks to David Monllaó who provided this update on behalf of the integration team:

Cold numbers:

488 issues have been successfully integrated since the last integration exposed post, with 43 issues reopened and 13 delayed, a 92% success

Notes:

• Next Monday (9th January) we will release Moodle 3.2.1, it is a good moment to upgrade your sites to to 3.2 branch. Along with it we will release new versions for all maintained stable versions: Moodle 3.1.4, Moodle 3.0.8 and Moodle 2.7.18
• The continuous integration and on-sync periods are over, we started Moodle 3.3 development cycle, new features and improvements are already landing in master branch, which already diverged from MOODLE_32_STABLE
• Nice new docs page for people interested in moving your institution's theme to a boost-based theme https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Creating_a_theme_based_on_boost
• We are increasing the number of user interfaces that are generated or updated through Javascript, it is becoming more and more important that we are all aware of common promises pitfalls and the best practices to follow. Request for comments: Ensuring promise best practices with eslint-plugin-promise
• Yummy list of issues that are waiting for a peer reviewer https://tracker.moodle.org/issues/?filter=13607

Hot topics:

• MDL-38158: Introduce pluggable media players in Moodle, add VideoJS player
• MDL-29795: Add user/group overrides for mod/assign
• MDL-48498: Create a setting for a blacklist of disallowed hosts for the curl class in Moodle
• MDL-48468: Add a Redis cache store to Moodle core

• MDL-55927: Move the radius authentication plugin to contrib

• MDL-56911: Theme CSS setting:name failed to operate in RTL

• MDL-56051: Add support for drag and drop blocks in boost
• MDL-57194: Allow chart colours to be customised site-wide.
• MDL-57023: User tours should remember previous step when revisitng the page
• MDL-56139: Message area should update with ajax rather than page reload
• MDL-56431: Messages page is not accessible

Warm thanks:

To everybody involved in 3.2 release, from people involved in designing new features, to issues reporters, developers, reviewers, testers, Helen and Mary, marketing... It has been tough but the result is great!

Cold numbers:

55 issues have been successfully integrated, 14 rejected and 3 delayed - 79% success.

Notes:

• We are entering into the continuous integration period. Integration and testing will continue throughout each week and we will be aiming for 2 or more releases each week until Moodle 3.2 is released.
• Code freeze for Moodle 3.2 is now in force, which means any non bug fix issues are given the integration_held label and are explicitly not picked for integration. Issues can be requested to be unheld using the 'unhold_requested' label
• QA for 3.2 will begin on Monday, all help testing, fixing and polishing the release will be greatly appreciated! See Moodle 3.2 QA starting on 31st Oct.

Hot topics:

• MDL-55074 - Significant block and navigation changes for Boost.
• MDL-56006 - "Boost" the default theme for new installs of Moodle
• MDL-53048 - Create new "password" fields that are not auto-filled by password managers

Warm thanks:

To Damyon Wiese, Development manager at Moodle HQ, for his efforts to boost theme_boost, support of team and beer brewing.

Happy Diwali!

Cold numbers:

54 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 92% success, again!

Notes:

• Today, October 24th, @ 14:00 AU/Perth time, code freeze will happen. That makes the start of the the continuous integration period, 5 weeks countdown, towards Moodle 3.2 release (November 28th).
• In general, new features and improvements won't be allowed after freeze, with everybody working on fixing and testing issues, aiming to bring the max stability and polishing to the new version.
• Next week, the 3.2 quality assurance cycle will start, with every problem detected getting fix priority. Aiming to 100% pass rate!
• Don't forget to be proactive labeling the issues while reporting, triaging, fixing, integrating and testing them. There are a number of processes depending of those labels (user and dev documentation, release notes...) and it's always better to label in excess than missing them.
• Right now there are 19 issues awaiting peer review, let's try to process all those that can be suitable for 3.2.
• No matter the 3.2 major release, we'll be also releasing minor Moodle 2.7.17, 2.9.9, 3.0.7 and 3.1.3 updates in 3 weeks (November 14th).
• OS/Browser/Selenium versions for testing have been fixed for Moodle 3.2 and they will be used for its life cycle.

Hot topics:

• MDL-54945 : Workshop portfolio API integration.
• MDL-45639 : SSO from mobile to web site.
• MDL-45639 : Allow to inject pre-scss to the new Boost theme.
• MDL-53832 : LTI v2.0 support added to enrol_lti.
• MDL-56022 : Assignment offline grading in plain, 1 level, folder.
• MDL-43230 : Manually revoke badges.
• And lots more in areas like themes, messaging, book, unit and acceptance tests, book...

Warm thanks:

• To Ruslan Kabalin, for his continuous help in different areas of Moodle along the years in a supportive and sweet way. And because Open Source matters, you true lovers!

For me, open source is a moral thing.

--- Matt Mullenweg

Cold numbers:

42 issues integrated, 4 rejected and 5 delayed. 92% success, yippee!

Notes:

1w to Freeze and 2w to QA start. 6w to 3.2 release. Big weeks. Be patient. 31 issues awaiting peer-review.

Hot topics:

MDL-54682 (messaging UI changes), MDL-52051 (DropBox API v2), MDL-27072 (quiz reports better handling users), MDL-53695 (new minifier), MDL-56248 (phpunit 5.5.), a lots more in themes, unit tests, performance...

Warm thanks:

• To Colin Campbell, for all his sustained work detecting, reporting and fixing issues (especially gradebook ones). Many, many thanks, much appreciated!

Kids get bored easily. They have got to

get out and get their hands dirty: make things,

dismantle things, fix things.

--- Bruce Dickinson

Cold numbers:

64 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 93% success, really nice!

Notes:

• Moodle 3.2 release has been delayed by 2 weeks (November 28th) in order to get the new Boost theme as polished as possible.
• Everything else has been accordingly sliced by 2 weeks, so the new code freeze date is October 24th, 14:00 Perth/Australia TZ.
• QA testing will happen with both the Clean and Boost themes to ensure that everything is ok.
• Last week, right after rolling the weeklies (October 6th), an important problem was found and, once fixed, new weeklies were rolled a day later (October 7th). Please, run away from the 6th version (Build: 20161006) and use the 7th version instead (Build: 20161007).
• Right now there are 58 issues awaiting peer-review. Would be great to get the maximum of them ready for integration before freeze. Help is welcome!
• Did you know this little nice feature now available in the profile pages @ moodle.org? Well done, David!

Hot topics:

• MDL-31243 : Refactor sql code generation for getting accesses and enrolments.
• MDL-55986 : Various problems with behat under Windows fixed.
• MDL-52317 : Better resizing of large images.
• MDL-56069 : Fixes to quiz navigation scroll.
• MDL-55990: Fixed a rare database upgrade problem.
• MDL-39117 : Added APCu cache store to core.
• MDL-22078 : Added course end date support to core.
• MDL-56172 : Old CSS optimizer has been removed from 3.2.
• MDL-55964 : Fixes to the competencies breakdown report.
• Many 3rd part libraries upgraded.
• And lots more in areas like themes, web services, javascript, assignments, installation, forms...

Warm thanks:

• To Mary Evans, for all her theme contributions and for being a themes forum moderator. And, of course, for maintaining lots of additional themes for Moodle. Big thanks!

If your music is great, you will have fans, not because

you have spent time chatting on social media.

-- Bryan Adams

Cold numbers:

Along the the last 2 weeks 53 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 16 delayed. That's 89% success, good one!

Notes:

• First of all, sorry for the delayed issues. Both the complexity of some of the issues and the reduced availability of people (national holidays, Australian Moot...) have leaded to that. Of course, all those delayed issues will get prioritized handling next week, so they should be meeting core really soon.
• We are just 10 days away from code freeze (October 10th, 14:00 Perth/Australia TZ). That means that, if everything is ready, the awesome Moodle 3.2 will be released in just 6 weeks (November 14th).
• Everybody is welcome to discuss, comment about next-next Moodle 3.3 release requirements @ MDL-54901 and linked issues.
• We are phasing out both jshint and csslint, replacing them with modern and better supported eslint and stylelint. It has been a complex matter to get them configured in a balanced and useful way and, surely, adjustments will happen along the time.
  Now they are (being) perfectly integrated into our development facilities (grunt, travis, cibot...) and your favorite IDE should be able to work with them too. As a result of all that work, now both the Javascript coding style and CSS coding style are way better defined and checked.
  Special thanks to Dan Poltawski for taking and leading the project and to everybody that has collaborated along the last months towards it.
• A renewed, XAMPP based, Moodle installer for Windows has been rolled recently. It comes with PHP7 and MariaDB and works with Windows Vista and later versions (XP/2003 users should continue using previous versions). For any problem, idea, please comment @ MDLSITE-4669.
• Important: Last week we detected a small, but important regression included in last (September 12th) releases. Sites with the $CFG->loginhttps option enabled got the "forgot password" functionality broken. It has been already fixed (MDL-55945) and everybody using those recent releases and having the option enabled is recommended to update to the corresponding "plus" (weeklies) current versions. Finally, side note, here there is also a recommendation to stop using such a $CFG->loginhttps option. It provides a non-accurate sense of security, keeping everything else not secured. Change to full encrypted site ASAP (shouldn't be hard if you are already doing it for logins!).

Hot topics:

• MDL-55071 : The new "Boost" theme (Bootstrap 4 based) has landed. Still many things to polish there, but it's the base and future of Moodle theming. Current/ongoing prototype available here.
• MDL-55837 : Together with previous issue, both the base and canvas themes have been deprecated and won't be part of core anymore.
• MDL-42041 : Better placement for book's "Turn edit on" button.
• MDL-29332 : Correct case-sensitive handling of data in calculated questions. Sites being affected by this and using old (< 3.0.x) Moodle versions should upgrade to supported version or, alternatively, try some of the workarounds proposed in both the docs and in the issue.
• MDL-53870 : Needed modifications in core in order to allow offline quizzes from the Mobile app.
• And lots more in areas like web services, themes, libraries, enrolment, messaging...

Warm thanks:

• To Jason Hardin, from Moodle's partner Moodlerooms, because of all his work related with accessibility: organizing meetings, proxying requests, reporting problems and providing solutions and all his continuous collaborations here and there. Thanks!

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.

So far, the Universe is winning.

– Rich Cook

Cold numbers:

22 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected - 78% success.

Notes:

• We are 4 weeks away from code freeze (10th October). It's crunch time!
• The new boostrap4 based theme is coming along in MDL-55070 and associated issues, the team are working through outstanding problems detected by behat and then the  branch will be sent for integraion. Have a play on the prototype site.
• Did you miss the recent Usability test? Now would be a great time to subscribe to the usability forum and tell your users about future studies - to help shape the future of Moodle UX

Hot topics:

• MDL-55791 - New capability to allow certain users through Maintenance mode
  
• MDL-55727 - New AMD JS modal module
• MDL-52798 - Calendar preferences links unified to user preferences page
  
• MDL-41174 - Ajax quick edit of activity name does not update the calendar event name

To Jan Eberhardt for the patches and plugins contributed to the Moodle community and especially this week when I duplicated your work!

Cold numbers:

18 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 1 delayed - 90% success

Notes:

• 2 weeks for new minor releases: 3.1.2, 3.0.6, 2.9.8 and 2.7.16 (https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Releases#General_release_calendar)
  
• It is a good moment to start sending big issues to integration if they are ready, no need to wait until for the week before the code freeze
  
• Many sick people in Perth
  

Hot topics:

MDL-38105 Allow negative score for rubric and change default grade calculation method

MDL-55312 Load timeout for modules: core/first occurs after purge caches

MDL-54873 Assignment blind marking performance issues

MDL-55710 Add support for doughnut chart type

Warm thanks:

To Mathieu Petit-Clair, a Moodle legend that rejoined HQ after some years in Canada. For his work in MoodleCloud

Cold numbers:

41 issues have been successfully integrated, 0 rejected and 0 delayed - 100% success!

Notes:

• In http://prototype.moodle.net/ you can test some Moodle 3.2 new features, a nice way to easily see the new features in action, feel free to provide feedback in https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=8052 or on the tracker issues linked to each project's site
  
• MoodleMoot Australia 2016 will be in Perth, where most of HQ employees work and live. The conference looks good. Plenty of beaches and black swans as well.
  
• GSOC 2016 just finished. Thanks to all students and mentors involved this year, thanks to Helen and Dan Marsden as well. Project outcomes will be presented in https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Developer_meeting_September_2016
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-18592 Allow teacher to make choices for students
  
• MDL-54680 Offer cartridges in LTI provider
  
• MDL-55445 Add ability to add small and large logos into core
  
• MDL-46514 Behat does not recognise the fatal error
  
• MDL-44712 improve Multi-SCO completion handing in activity completion
  
• MDL-55072 Upgrades to Behat so it can work with different themes
  
• MDL-55628 Course completion uses cache inefficiently
  
• MDL-55604 Static acceleration inconsistently uses cache_cached_object
  
• MDL-55229 Meta Enrolment - Search for course produces error
  

Warm thanks:

To all contributors which contributed patches weren’t accepted into core, because we appreciate a lot that you dedicated time to improve Moodle, and we would like to encourage you to continue contributing to Moodle and to express your opinion if you don't agree with our decisions.

Cold numbers:

57 issues have been successfully integrated with 8 rejected - 88% success.

Notes:

• Work is ongoing on a new bootstrap-4 based theme in MDL-55070 - try for yourself at the prototype site and join the discussion at the themes forum.
• The official list of webservice functions should now be more accurate and descriptive with the automation of the list generation 
• Messaging is getting a UI rethinking over in MDL-54682
• The CSS coding style was recently approved and CSS/LESS/SCSS are now being linted more thoroughly with stylelint (MDL-55058)
• A proposal has been put forward to make the file conversions an API (MDL-55528)

Hot topics:

• MDL-3782 - Allow multiple answers in cloze MULTICHOICE question type
  
• MDL-55292 - Added support for profiling with Tidways (supports php7)
  
• MDL-54606 - Added support for Redis as a session handler
  
• MDL-45734 / MDL-55061 - New event for badges and grade exporting
  
• MDL-55464 - Add "mod/label:view" permission to allow interesting use cases for restricted messages
  
• MDL-55140 - Allow choice open and close dates to act separately
  
• MDL-50286 / MDL-51078 - some improvements to log report to allow better filtering
• MDL-53016 - Autoloader now supports PSR-4
  

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers:

88 issues have been successfully integrated, 11 rejected and 3 delayed - 88.89% success.

Notes:

• Charts JS has been selected as the new charts library for Moodle, most of Moodle's graphs have been converted to chartsjs already, more to come. You can take a look at them in master branch as MDL-54987 has already been integrated.
• If you are a developer you have probably used setExpectedException method when writing unit tests, master branch switched to phpunit 5.4 branch, expectedException() and expectedExceptionMessage() should be used instead now. More info in MDL-55091
  
• Ongoing discussions regarding Moodle hooks in MDL-44078 and https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=327349
  
• We updated jQuery to 3.1 in master branch, you may be interested in checking jQuery change log if you are using it in your plugins

Hot topics:

• MDL-54987: Introduce a new chart API and library
  
• MDL-55048: Upgrade grunt and npm dependencies (and add travis checks on node version variants)
  
• MDL-31356: IMS Enterprise enrol plugin added features
  
• MDL-37250: Lessons students attempts are not saved if they timeout
• MDL-54977: Getting to the bottom level of menus breaks them
• MDL-18599: Upon restore, association of "owner" of single simple discussion forum type defaults to user completing restore. Solution: hide author of the first post
• MDL-50937: Update to JQuery 3.1
  
• MDL-53222: Revise admin settings/report for global search for improved usability
  
• MDL-11369: Choice deadline does not appear in the course calendar
  

Warm thanks:

To Ken Task, for his dedication helping to everybody in the forums, always positive. And because Yesterday it was his 10 years Moodle anniversary!

Cold numbers:

50 issues have been successfully integrated with 1 rejected and 2 delayed. That's 98% success, near unbeatable!

Notes:

• Moodle 3.2 requirements (MDL-53019) have been applied to master and, from now on, PHP 5.6.5 is the minimum version supported. Update your development environments!
• Everybody is welcome to discuss, comment about next-next Moodle 3.3 release @ MDL-54901.
• Next Monday (July 11th) we'll be releasing new minor versions 2.7.15, 2.9.7, 3.0.5 and 3.1.1, coming with some nice bug fixes, back-port requests applied and, of course, the latest security fixes.
• After a period of instability and many, many tested combinations, we have finally defined the working combos that everybody should be using for Moodle 3.1 and up.

Hot topics:

• MDL-54734 : Problems with forum mails not observing recipient language.
• MDL-54165 : Improve the grading interface when unoconv is not available.
• MDL-54869 : Fixed upload of private user files from web-services and API clarified.
• MDL-54877 : Fixes to the LTI tools managing page.
• And lots more in areas like web services, assignments, user management, javascript, workshops...

Warm thanks:

• To Mary Cooch, because of all those awesome screencasts, showing every new feature of Moodle in an beautiful way. And because often we, crazy developers, introduce last-minute changes ruining her work and, no matter of that, her mood / reaction is always positive and great. Thanks!

Writing is good, thinking is better.

Cleverness is good, patience is better.

-- Herman Hesse

Cold numbers:

26 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 6 delayed. That's 81% success, not bad after some weeks for many of them waiting frozen in the fridge!

Notes:

• After 5 intense weeks of continuous integration and testing (1, 2), the 3.1 release and, finally, 3 weeks under on-sync... we are back to normal weeklies, yay!
• All the frozen issues along those 8 weeks have been moved to integration and will be normally processed, hopefully without much delays, in a couple of weeks. Thanks all!
• We really wanted to introduce the new eslint (JS lint / coding style) tool early in the cycle (MDL-52127), so it's already there, with both grunt and CiBoT using it for every master modification/patch out there. There is still some fine-tuning work in order to get the final rules applied (see MDL-54939, MDLSITE-4628...), but it's a step towards getting JS under control. Please be patient, it all should become final and documented really soon.
• Last week was the due date for deciding about the next Moodle 3.2 requirements (to be released on November 2016) and, for it and upwards, we are moving to PHP 5.6.5 as minimum version supported. No changes in database versions neither extensions so far. Visit the issue (MDL-53019) for more details about the decision and linked information. The change implies that, in a couple of weeks, your (master) development and testing environments won't work anymore with PHP 5.4 and 5.5, be warned !
• At the same time, the issue (MDL-54901) about deciding next-next requirements (Moodle 3.3, May 2017), has been created, we have 6 months to discuss and decide about it. You are welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-54842: Fix html problems in the assignment grading page.
• MDL-54837: Exception on manage tags page.
• MDL-54562: Global search now supporting database activity area.
• MDL-54797: Indexed deletion of completion criteria.
• And lots more in areas like blogs, themes, quizzes, javascript...

Warm thanks:

• To Helen Foster, because she checks all the language strings - and it takes hours - and it is something that nobody actually realises or appreciates - you just see the finished words and don't think about it. Not only because of that, but because of that too!

People think that computer science is

the art of geniuses but the actual reality

is the opposite, just many people doing things

that build on each other, like a wall of mini stones.

-- Donald Knuth

Cold numbers: 

57 issues have been successfully integrated and 8 rejected since the start of freeze period - 86% success.

Notes:

• We have just released Moodle 3.1 beta, signifying the point where we are feature complete for the upcoming release. We renew our focus on stabilising, testing and polishing to iron out any outstanding issues. If you maintain a Moodle site and are able to test Moodle 3.1 on a copy of that data, please give it a go and report any problems experienced in the tracker.
  
• QA Testing of Moodle 3.1 is progressing well, with 85% of tests passed so far
• Be aware that some deprecated web-services have been removed in 3.1 MDL-49414
• Server requirements for 3.2 are being defined in MDL-53019 - please add your views to that issue before discussion closes at the end of the month

Hot topics:

• MDL-53738 - Feedback module enabled by default
  
• MDL-52035 - LTI Provider added support in Moodle
  
• MDL-51142 - "Login as" no longer modifies assignment submission status
  
• MDL-52550 - Unable to drag-n-drop an image into Atto in IE
  

Warm thanks:

Cold numbers:

33 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 10 delayed. That's 92% success, beautiful one!

Notes:

• Given the size and complexity of issues landing last week we had to delay a number of them (10) for this week. Aiming to kill (in the good way) all them ASAP. Thanks for your patience!
• From now on we are in the continuous integration period, trying to release as often as possible and with some strict rules about holding improvements and new features that did not pass the freeze barrier.
• Moodle 3.1 QA testing round will start this week and, as far as we are not feature complete yet, some of the tests will be held and executed later. Also, it's possible that other tests will need to be executed twice, once various adjustments to features are performed.
• Please, be aggressive labeling the issues you are working on. Having them properly set (docs_required, dev_docs_required, api_change, release_notes, ui_change...) really helps to have the documentation updated and on time for release. Specially call for the last one, ui_change, because usually it involves reviewing both screenshots and videos, a great deal of effort. Of course, everybody is welcome to collaborate, you know the motto, "it's a wiki!".

Hot topics:

• MDL-53451: CBE has been integrated into core.
• MDL-52954: Improvements to the assignments grading interface.
• MDL-53772: Problems with contexts and validate_context() fixed.
• MDL-52781: Centralized way to validate/clean user information.
• MDL-51603: New dataformat plugin type to improve exporting of information.
• And lots more in areas like forums, assignments, web services, usability, global search...

Warm thanks:

• To the iTeam, because we are about to start a period that requires the best from all us (patience, attention, wide thinking...) and they deserve these thanks and more. Go, go, go, Andrew, Dan, David and Rajesh, we can!

Everybody else specializes.

Daddy knows everything,

and he puts the pieces together.

-- Robert A. Heinlein

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 77% success, twice my favorite number, heh!

Notes:

• Countdown: 5 weeks for 3.1 release, and code freeze is next Monday 14:00h, Perth/Australia time.
• Once freeze is in effect, any improvement or new feature will be labelled as "integration_held" and those issues won't be considered till some weeks after release. No matter of that there is a last chance of having those issues re-considered for integration by labelling them as "unhold_requested". Development managers will review all those requests and decide if they are accepted for 3.1 or finally held.
• There are 26 issues awaiting peer-review. How many of them will find their way before freeze?
• Please, try not comment into closed issues, at least without creating a new issue as followup. Closed issues are rarely followed and it's highly possible to get those comments lost/ignored. If there is any objection, problem, regression... please create new issues always.

Hot topics:

• MDL-45064: LTI preconfigured activities can be picked in the activity chooser.
• MDL-45064: Allow multiple areas to be filtered on search.
• MDL-52707: Allow tags to be combined.
• MDL-53440: Better workflow for accepting multiple courses.
• MDL-53440: New options added to external_format_text()
• And lots more in areas like web services, tags, courses, wiki...

Warm thanks:

• To The Nothing, mainly because today I feel myself inspired enough to be original. Maybe also coz that is my brain content lately, who knows. LOL. Thanks!

If builders built buildings the way

programmers built programs,

then the first woodpecker that came along

would destroy civilization.

-- Gerald Weinberg

Cold numbers: 

31 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 3 delayed - 94% success.

Notes:

• In case you missed it - code freeze for 3.1 has been bumped back to April 18th, the entire schedule is moved back, so that  the planned release of 3.1 is scheduled for May 23th. Note that the minor releases schedule is not affected and will happen as scheduled on May 9th.
  
• Use of chained steps in behat has been deprecated. See docs page Migrating_from_Behat_2.5_to_3.x_in_Moodle for how this might impact you (MDL-53381) 
• After some extensive discussion a new guidance has been given for the use of magic methods, see Coding_style#Magic_methods

Hot topics:

• MDL-17955 - Forum timed posts no longer marked as experimental
  
• MDL-43470 - Unable to select multiple values while mapping site-wide feedback to courses
  
• MDL-53612 - Book chapters added to global search
  
• MDL-53461 - Intro images are not shown in the mobile app
• MDL-53500 - User Complete/Outline report will not show activities with "view" capability to parent role
  

Warm thanks:

To Jun Pataleta for many bug fixes, peer reviews and guiding this integrator to his home!

Cold numbers:

53 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 1 delayed. That's 91% success, good one!

Notes:

• Countdown: 6 weeks for 3.1 release, 1 week for code freeze.
• There are 25 issues awaiting peer-review. Nice reduction from previous week, well done!
• A new version of the codechecker has been released fixing some indentation problems. Still, it seems that there are some remaining problems with multi-line statements mixed with arrays. Be warned, you'll get them in your reports!
• Days are now longer than nights here in the north hemisphere. I hate that!

Hot topics:

• MDL-53509: Problems fixed on digest mails.
• MDL-51867: Any plugin can declare its use of scales.
• MDL-52952: Prevent (incorrect) password auto-filling to happen.
• MDL-48012: Recycle bin plugin added to 3.1.
• MDL-52207: Zend framework has been completely removed from core.
• And lots more in areas like quizzes, web services, many core libraries updated, javascript, messaging...

Warm thanks:

• To All Men, from planet Earth. And specifically to those being genuine moodlers. Undoubtedly less brilliant than previous integration exposed counterparts but... still... big, big thanks too!

Nine people can’t make a baby in a month.

-- Fred Brooks

Cold numbers:

The week of March 7th 40 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 15 delayed. That's 93% success, nice one!

The week of March 14th 29 issues have been successfully integrated with 7 rejected and 1 delayed. Nicely we were able to integrate all the delayed issues in the previous week.

Notes:

• With minor stables released last week, the next big milestone is the release of Moodle 3.1 in less than 2 months (May 9th). That's only 7 weeks away.
• 7 minus 5 = 2 weeks for major release code freeze, in 3 weeks the QA testing process will kick off and everybody will be crazily busy. So get some air, relax a bit and get ready!
• There are 58 issues awaiting peer-review. Any help is welcome there, at least to be able to verify that nothing important misses the train!
• Looking forward Moodle 3.2 requirements are now under discussion and final decision will also happen also in May (3 weeks after release). Ideas welcome!
• Big issues covering the major features planned for 3.1 (CBE, LTI sweeties , Assignment grading UI...), are slowly landing to integration. We'll try our best, aiming to generate feedback as soon as possible. Please, be patient!

Hot topics:

• MDL-53273, MDL-53247, MDL-53354 ...: Various fixes and improvements to the global search feature are happening at a quick pace.
• MDL-46891: Upgrade to Behat 3.0, yay!
• MDL-53010: Fixed problem editing roles.
• MDL-53176: Improvements to grade history report backported to stables.
• MDL-50032: External functions self-registration into services.
• And lots more in areas like web services, gradebook, access, repositories, quiz and questions... awesome work!

Warm thanks:

• To All Women, from planet Earth. And specifically to those being genuine moodlers. No justification needed, no words required. Just big, big, thanks!

In true open source development, there's lots of visibility

all the way through the development process.

-- Brian Behlendorf

Cold numbers: 

39 issues have been successfully integrated, 0 rejected and 2 delayed - 100% success, a rare event in normal weeklies!

Notes:

• We are hoping to land Behat 3 next week in MDL-46891 after a significant amount of work, we are aiming to keep backwards compatibility whilst hopefully moving Moodle towards a better BDD approach which the behat project are encouraging
• Global search has landed to Moodle and evolvments continue - See MDL-31989 for discussions on adding a local database engine and if you have a add-on it might be a great time to try and implement global search for your plugin
• Freeze fast approaches for 3.1 release, get your code finalised for review soon!

Hot topics:

• MDL-52397 - Assign feedback not sent if assign grade timemodified is set two days ago
  
• MDL-30811 - Introduce notification stack to moodle sessions
  
• MDL-50887 - New antivirus plugin type
  
• MDL-50794 - Restricting file types as attachments to a workshop
  

Warm thanks:
To Russell Smith for numerous deep dives into the MUC and finding extremely valuable improvements in performance. Many thanks!

(Editado por Eloy Lafuente (stronk7) - envío original viernes, 4 de marzo de 2016, 8:57 ), fixing links to Tracker, thanks JH

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected - 83% success!

Notes:

• The next point release is scheduled for Monday 14th March. If you have peer reviewed issues awaiting your feedback, or other issues close to completion, you may want to spend a bit of time on them this coming week. The last integration cycle before the release starts on the 7th March and all issues must be up for integration review before 6am UTC.
  
• Are you still using the legacy log store? Support for writing to that store has now been deprecated. See MDL-45104 for more information.
• Having trouble running behat after upgrading Firefox? Please make sure that you upgrade Selenium too. Recent updates in Firefox have broken compatibility.
• Keen to see mod_feedback come out of experimental? The issues currently preventing this are being brought together in MDL-52094.
• The details of a number of new features have recently been posted in the Future major features forum. You may want to have a look and see what may be heading your way in the near future. Recent topics include Competency Based Education, User disguises, Assignment Grading UX, Displaying information to users on redirect, and Navigation overhaul.
• The much anticipated Global Search feature landed in master this week. Developer documentation will be arriving soon so keep an eye out for updates.

Hot topics:

• MDL-31989 - Global Search
  
• MDL-53081 - Review and improve the txt files in the moodle.git root
• MDL-52958 - Vimeo fullscreen
• MDL-53071 - Unable to use a space as section name to have a section without a header
• MDL-52970 - Failures with Selenium 2.50.1, FF 44.0

Warm thanks:

To Jean-Michel Védrine, who has contributed a number of plugins over his many years working with Moodle, has mentored in several Google Summer of Codes, and has been a Particularly Helpful Moodler for a number of years too. Jean-Michel has indicated that he will be ending his teacher career in the coming months. We wish him every success in the future and hope that he continues his Moodling

(Edited by Dan Poltawski to correct point release date - original submission Friday, 26 February 2016, 5:22 AM)

Cold numbers:

40 issues have been succesfully integrated and 3 rejected - 93% success!.

Notes:

• Do you use web services? Now would be a great time to test your integration against Moodle 3.1dev (master). The XMLRPC and SOAP protocols have been changed internally and would benefit from wider community testing for compatibility. The AMF protocol has been removed. (see MDL-52208 MDL-52209 MDL-52210)
• Interested in Moodle platform requirements? Discussion for raising the system requirements for Moodle 3.2 is now open. Raising the minimum version of PHP from 5.4.4 is the likely hot topic. Please comment on MDL-53019 if you want to see us change the requirements (or keep them the same). We will close the discussion for comments on 30/05/2016.

• CiBot has had an upgrade! The Moodle Code checker has been upgraded from the 1.x series to phpcs to 2.5.1+  (CONTRIB-5732). This new release allows type hinting and the ability skip warnings. Though some 

  indentation problems have been detected and the fix is  ongoing in CONTRIB-6146
• Increasing unit-test platform coverage... Investigations are ongoing in doing CI testing on Microsoft platforms using Appveyor. When combined with Travis-CI this would enable developer branches to be pre-checked against all DB engines but Oracle. See MDL-53136 for details.
• Did you miss yesterday's general developer meeting?  The recording is now available on youtube and features Competency based education, User interface & usability and Mobile and integration. See

Hot topics:

• MDL-28030 - Add config.php settings to allow plugins to rewrite output moodle_urls (eg clean / semantic urls)
• MDL-51214 - Rename the News forum to "Announcements"
• MDL-52511 - Add support for PostgreSQL 9.5
• MDL-48634 - Gradebook: Add option to rescale existing grades when changing max points
• MDL-34160 - Allow forum email subject to be customised
• MDL-52387 - LDAP support for Fine Grained Password Policies
• MDL-52414 - Allow Default Settings for Lesson Module Settings
• MDL-52990 - Templates to allow forum emails to be customised 
• MDL-51802 - Reusable element for inline name editing
• MDL-53012 - Behat: Add step to run scheduled task

Warm thanks:

To Dani Palou, Moodle Mobile team member for hard work on our mobile app and improving our core web services, thanks!

Cold numbers:

23 issues have been successfully integrated, 2 rejected and 3 delayed - 92% success.

Notes:

• You probably have seen comments from CiBoT in tracker issues, it helps us during development and during code reviews as we can easily detect issues in patches submitted for review, but until now it didn't report unit test results, now it does it through Travis CI integration. More info in MDLSITE-4414 and MDLSITE-4409
  
• Moodle 3.1 system requirements will be pushed for integration next week (actually this week because this is last week's integration exposed post) Moodle 2.7 will be required to upgrade to Moodle 3.1, if you are using a lower version you can always upgrade to 2.7 and later to 3.1. More info in MDL-51580

Hot topics:

• MDL-51306: Bulk download all files within a folder activity as ZIP file
  
• MDL-52637: Connection to SMTP mail not working with Moodle 3.0 (result of phpmailer update)
• MDL-51723: Users are unenrolled on login under LDAP auth with Active Directory
• MDL-52930: mod_forum: Fix get_unmailed_posts logic for timed posts

Warm thanks:

To Brendan Heywood, for being very active this last months and for pushing for MDL-28030. Many thanks.

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated, 4 rejected and 1 delayed - 78.95% success.

Notes:

• We have a new great prototype in http://prototype.moodle.net/ It is Competence Based Education. Thanks to Damyon, Fred, Université de Montréal and all the other people involved in the specs and development.
• Grunt watch is your new friend for Moodle development, you can run grunt watch from CLI and it will wait for you to save any less or JS file and autocompile CSS, YUI modules or AMD modules for you (MDL-49817) Remember to update your dependencies before running it: npm install
• New tags stuff landed in master thanks to Marina, now you can limit a tags area to standard (previously official) tags; 3.1 will be a good release for people using tags component

Hot topics:

• MDL-52715: Create a new requires class for implementing mforms in AJAX.
• MDL-51283: Rename "official" tags to "standard", allow admin to set for each tag area how to use standard tags
  
• MDL-45740: Adding new events - Choice module
• MDL-49817: Development - Watch for JS/LESS changes and compile once a file is saved
  
• MDL-52831: Moodle allows to register with empty name and then deletes the account silently
• MDL-52137: Forum digest emails contain incorrect links and duplicated information

Warm thanks:

To Dan Poltawski, for being always there, helping everywhere and everybody.

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been succesfully integrated, 7 rejected and 1 delayed - 74% success.

Notes:

• We recently passed 10,000 integrated issues since introducing the Integration process around Moodle 2.x - thanks to all the developers, integrators and testers who have put in the blood sweat and tears in our evolved process!
  
• The Moodle codechecker is being upgraded to the 2.x series over in CONTRIB-5732 - testers welcome!
• See and contribute to the recent developer discussions about updating to behat 3.x, moving js functions out of the global namespace and securely passing callbacks from client side code
• Once again apologies in the gap in these posts, we're thin on the ground and our communication suffers!

Hot topics:

• MDL-31635 - Course completion "grade" criteria assume all grades are percentages
• MDL-51702 - Cannot assign roles to blocks in indexsys.php (default Dashboard or My page)
• MDL-52780 - Better email debugging with X-Moodle-Originating-Script header
• MDL-52839 - Some scenarios failing on Selenium 2.49

Warm thanks:

To Paul Nicholls for many great plugins and contributions to Moodle core - thanks!

Cold numbers:

35 issues have been successfully integrated, 3 rejected and 4 delayed. That is 92% success, great!

Notes:

Back to a normal week of integration after last weeks' Moodle 3.0 sprint and we even managed to get the week finished off on Wednesday - thanks to all for a smooth week of integration! 

Please note that from this week, our npm configuration for installing grunt depdencies switched to use 'shrinkwrap' to lock depdencies down better (resolving various problems). Developers using very old versions of npm may need to upgrade (MDL-52250).

Hot Topics:

MDL-45712 - Add Result field to the SCORM Interactions Report

MDL-52334 - Regression in login performance with enrol_database

MDL-23128 - Prevent dvips from cluttering in the error log when using TeX filter

MDL-52402 - Problems restoring quiz attempt logs

MDL-52558 - Data generator enrol_user should let you specify role shortname

Warm Thanks:

To our entire community! Let me take this opportunity to wish Merry Christmas to you from all at Moodle HQ

 祝圣诞节快乐

Dan

Cold numbers:

19 issues have been successfully integrated, 221 QA tests passed, 18,000+ behat scenarios ran and 148,140 unit test combinations completed! Busy week!

Notes:

A weekly release has of Moodle 3.0+ has just arrived into moodle.git and the official release of Moodle 3.0.1 will arrive very shortly with PHP 7.0 supported! As is usual, Moodle administrators should use caution and testing to ensure that their installation will continue to operate on PHP7, be aware that this PHP release is very young. In particularly some known issues:

• The Microsoft SQL Server PHP drivers are not currently available for PHP7.  The mssql driver (used on non-windows platforms) is removed from PHP7 and the sqlsrv driver (windows only) is still in development. Sites which operate on SQL server or connect to it via the auth_db plugin or enrol_db plugin should not upgrade.
• The Oracle PHP driver is known to buggy and segfaults in some circumstances, we are continuing investigate and isolate this in MDL-52544 and report this to the maintainers. Again sites installed on Oracle or using auth_db/enrol_db should not upgrade.
  
• Add-on plugins may not be working on PHP7 and will need developers to test and upgrade their code to be compatible. A guide in developer docs is a starting point for developers looking to upgrade their plugins: Moodle_and_PHP7 

To Rajesh Taneja for coordinating our testing efforts at Moodle HQ, both automated and human - its often chaotic and demanding and we couldn't do it without you! 

Cold numbers:

15 issues have been successfully integrated, with 7 rejected and 8 delayed. That is 68% success, not as great as we'd like, but it was also was an intentionally small round in order to facilitate next weeks work..

Notes:

• While we've known about the benefits of Moodle on PHP 7.0 for some time, the release last week prompted more discussions and a bold plan was drawn up to move towards MOODLE_30_STABLE (and later) supported on PHP 7.0 asap. For the next week we will be concentrating solely on achieving PHP 7.0 support on Moodle 3.0 and will aim to release Moodle 3.0.1 shortly after. 
• A result of our php7 sprint is that this weeks integration round was a small one and next week we will only be integrating php 7 related changes. We thank you for your patience during this time, but it seems clear there is a lot of community appetite to get the benefits of Moodle on PHP7 sooner rather than later.

Hot Topics:

• MDL-51582 - Grunt is now used to compile less into CSS
  
• MDL-52209 - New XML-RPC web service implementation
• MDL-51483 - Inserting media in assignment via "online text" causes page to cease loading
• MDL-52304 - Shockwave Flash media player fullscreen doesn't work
  

Warm Thanks:

To Tony Levi for his pioneering work on php7 support and Marina Glancy for working hard to push it through to achieve this in the coming days.

Cold numbers:

36 issues have been successfully integrated with 13 rejected and 4 delayed. That's 73% success, far from perfect, but expected after the long frozen period, with lots of issues being (always controversial) new features.

Notes:

• We are back to normal integration, with all the held issues over the last weeks being processed as quickly as possible. Special thanks to Andrew, David, Dan and Rajesh (iTeam) for the extra effort this week. Luckily in only happens twice every year!
• There are 43 issues awaiting peer-review. We should be able to reduce it over the next weeks. Can you imagine a zero-pending Xmas present?
• Voting is open about Moodle 3.1 requirements. It's now or never. Note that, immediately after that one is decided, the corresponding issue for Moodle 3.2 will be created and all remaining details will be moved there, with (near) six months to discuss about it.
• We are moving, for 29_STABLE and up, from recess to grunt to compile less style-sheets. So, once it's landed... everybody should be using it for submitted patches. All checks (CiBoT, post-commit jobs...) will, automatically, start to use it too.
• Open for discussion, MDLSITE-2132 and linked issues to complete the wrapping rules once and forever.
• The Prepare Moodle for PHP7 Epic is advancing pretty well (PHP 7.0.0 has been just released!), aiming to get it completed asap.

Hot topics:

• MDL-52260: Problem editing profile having locked profile fields.
• MDL-44598: List students in assignment "grant extension" page.
• MDL-50661: Smaller logo to be shown (opt-in) in all pages.
• MDL-51700: Better cleaning of AJAX returned values from external functions.
• MDL-26935: New capability to control role renaming in courses.
• And lots more in areas like web services, acceptance tests, usability, plagiarism, files API...

Warm thanks:

• To CiBoT, from the Public Moodle CI Server, for helping us everywhere, anytime. Tirelessly and efficiently performing all those loved (hated anyone?) reviews and also supporting a good number of automations in the Tracker. Thanks!

Drinking a cup of coffee with your eyes closed

isn't a sophisticated task for a person,

but it's hard for a robot.

-- Vijay Kumar

Edited: To fix some incorrect links, thanks Marcus for warning me!

Cold numbers:

29 issues have been integrated with 6 rejected and 1 delayed, 83% success.

Notes:

• This has been the last on-sync week. We have been keeping 3.0 and master (almost) exactly the same; more info in https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Integration_Review#On-sync_period
  
• On-sync period is now over and we will start processing all issues that were held since Moodle 3.0 code freeze, new features will start landing in master branch (3.1dev) along the next week. Thanks for your patience.
  
• Moodle 3.1 requirements should be decided by 30 Nov (next Monday) now is a good moment to comment: MDL-51580
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-52291: Table "qtype_multichoice_options" does not exist!!! Upgrading from 2.4.10 to 3.0
  
• MDL-52162: Upgrade to 3.0 through the browser fails: class question_graded_automatically not found
  
• MDL-52203: Error upgrading multianswer question to 3.0
  
• MDL-52214: is_web_crawler deprecated function not pointing correctly to the core_useragent alternative
  
• MDL-44330: Assignment opens up the "wrong" student grading form
  
• MDL-37834: Can't use Excel to edit the assignment Offline grading worksheet
  
• MDL-43069: "Submission comments" fail to expand if you hide the "file submissions" column
  

Warm thanks:

To Howard Miller, a Moodle legend, super long-time particularly helpful Moodler, with over 12000 forum posts and Moodle in English forum moderator. Thank you very much!

83 issues have been integrated with 10 rejected - 89.25% success.

Notes:

• After 4 Release Candidates Moodle 3.0 has been released, congratulations and thanks to everyone that contributed reporting, triaging, developing, reviewing and testing issues. Moodle 3.1 planning already started in Moodle HQ
• In integration we start on-sync period this week, improvements and new features for Moodle 3.1 are held until this period is over. Thanks for your patience
• According to https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Release_process#3_weeks_after in 2 weeks we should decide Moodle 3.1 requirements, you can comment on MDL-51580
• We published here the results of all Moodle 3.0rc3 unit tests (around 65000 assertions) and acceptance tests (around 40000 steps) in all supported browsers and operative systems

Hot topics: 

• MDL-51880 - Minor issues with Atto's table setting
  
• MDL-40245 - Creating the zip file when downloading all assignment submissions fails due to 30 second execution time out. 
  
• MDL-51552 - Single View" bulk insert for empty grades overwrites non-empty grades
  
• MDL-49473 - Export Logs does not contain year
  
• MDL-51482 - Unnecessary updates of lastinvalidation cache entries
  
• MDL-51314 - Performance problem on "view/grade all submissions" when groups enabled
  
• MDL-51922 - Add memcached + mongo testing to travis
  
• Many other fixes in atto editor, assignment module, themes, gradebook...
  

Warm thanks:

Germán Valero for his continuous support with languages and Moodle Docs, specially the Spanish ones.

Cold numbers:

75 issues have been succesfully integrated, with 15 rejected  - 83% success.

Notes:

• Today we released Moodle 3.0beta, marking a point where we are feature complete for the upcoming release. Work continues to test and fix any outstanding issues before the final release date. Please help us make the most stable release yet by testing on a copy of your production data.
  
• A number of issues which are of relevance to developers landed recently:
• Travis config which can be enabled on developer clones of moodle.git to facilitate pre-checking in various environments. See https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Travis_Integration
• Backup and restore for new-style events is now supported MDL-46455
  
• Multiple improvements to the plugins installer including dependency installation mean that this is a great time to get your plugin dependencies configured in version.php MDL-49329

Hot topics:

• MDL-45515 - Table editing features missing in Atto editor
  
• MDL-46455 - Backup and restore of new events
  
• MDL-38214 - Add MCS, MCVS, MCHS Cloze subquestion types
  
• MDL-49682 - Forum email template is not editable
  
• MDL-30674 - Set guest access key from enrolment methods page
  
• MDL-40836 - File resource: Option to display uploaded date
  
• MDL-49329 - Plugins installation improvements
  

Warm thanks:

To Ryan Wyllie - for getting stuck in here, there and everywhere and making Moodle better - thanks!

Cold numbers:

55 issues have been succesfully integrated, with 17 rejected  - 76% success.

Notes:

As planned, we are now frozen from new features landing until development opens for Moodle 3.1 (planned 7th December 2015). Now we focus on polishing Moodle 3.0 for release. It seems a long way a way when you look at it from today but it soon passes. This period usually is one of the busiest of the cycle and helps us ready our documentation, testing and so on. Interesting previous discussion on this topic: Do you find the code freeze/on-sync period problematic?

Please feel free to continue to submit your new features and improvements for integration during this time - your issue will be tagged as held but will not be forgotten about. (And of course, some things may be allowed to break freeze in exceptional circumstances). 

Hot topics:

• The majority of third party libraries included in Moodle got a bump this week
• MDL-49028 - wiki reset now allows pages to be deleted
• MDL-41042 - Course contacts shown in course listings no longer take time to update
• MDL-44707 - When customizing my homepage, block files are now copied over

Warm thanks:

Stasia Telford - one of the many behind the scenes team here at Moodle HQ working hard to make sure that things run smoothly and that we can focus on improving Moodle - thanks!

cheers,

Dan

Cold numbers:

28 issues have been succesfully integrated, with 8 rejected and 5 delayed - 75% success.

Notes:

On Monday we begin code freeze for Moodle 3.0, so if you want your New feature or improvement to make it into 3.0, get your issue peer reviewed and submitted to integration quickly, the must be 'Waiting for Integration' before Monday morning (UTC).

With code freeze comes the change to our integration schedule, see the documentation on the continuous period to understand what happens in the next month. The key thing is that we will be aiming to release more frequently and prioritise issues affects Moodle 3.0 release.

Note that normal bug fixes can continue to land during the freeze period, its just new features and improvements which are held.

Hot topics:

MDL-50658 - Support for LTI Memberships service

MDL-48947 - Section actions put into menu like activities

MDL-51498 - Critical performance issue in gradebook fixed

MDL-9070 - Forum timed posts: display period now displayed 

MDL-51390 - Badges can once again be added to mozilla backpack

Warm thanks:

To Mark Nielsen - a veteran of the Moodle community, for many bug fixes, looking after mod_lesson for a while and all your contributions over the years - thanks!

beijos,

Dan

Cold numbers:

29 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 4 delayed. That's 91% success, good one!

Notes:

• There are 23 issues awaiting peer-review.
• We are just one week away from Moodle 3.0 code freeze, when normal integration cycles do change noticeably and two before QA's kick off!
• The OU's drag and drop question types did land this week to Moodle. Congratulations to everybody that helped building, reviewing, reporting, suggesting... to make those questions better and better along the years.
• Backup & restore of new log stores seem to be be ready for integration. Great news! And thanks for all the hard work, iterations… till getting it done! Any help testing that stuff will be really welcome!

Hot topics:

• MDL-50917: Managers can access to user preferences.
• MDL-50332: Clarify message when enrollment instances do reach their max number of users.
• MDL-51190: Improve MS Edge support when embedding PDF documents.
• MDL-51431: Fix enrollments start date using the "flatfile" plugin.
• And many more in areas like web services, javascript, database activity, workshop...

Warm thanks:

• To Tim Hunt, from the Open University, UK., for helping people everywhere, all the time - forums on moodle.org, writing docs, and even helping someone to contribute a translation. Development aside, you know. Googolplexian thanks!

[...] Work transforms talent into genius.

-- Anna Pavlova

Cold numbers:

46 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 2 delayed. That's 96% success, wowowow!

Notes:

• It seems that this week we were finally able to catch up with delayed issues from last weeks, great work Andrew and David.
• There are 32 issues awaiting peer-review, same than 1 week ago... balanced, yes... but would be so great to get the list reduced before freeze... come on!
• We are just two weeks away from Moodle 3.0 code freeze!
• There are some important issues that we should be resolving ASAP:
  • MDL-49398: Accesslib role definitions cached. Lacking some serious big testing... hope it does not end missing the train for 3.0.
  • MDL-47494: New drag and drop question types from the OU, hopefully landing this week.
  • MDL-50182: About to push Moodle 3.0 environmental requirements to all supported branches.
• HEADS UP about the progression in the new performance "toolkit" (MDL-50862) being revamped, with Behat used as easy-source for both:
  • MDL-50863: A Behat-based new generator.
  • MDL-50864: A Behat to Jmeter's JMX converter tool.

Great work, Rajesh, keep the ball rolling! Comments are welcome.

Hot topics:

• MDL-30157: Allow manual enrolments to begin "now" added.
• MDL-51213: About to improve external_format_text|string() functions and clarify where they are allowed to be used.
• MDL-50766: Fix grunt behavior in some situations.
• MDL-51191: Improved upgrade to 2.8 caused by slow queries in assignments.
• And many more in areas like web services, libraries, gradebook, administration...

Warm thanks:

• To David Mudrák, from Moodle HQ, for his amazing work encouraging plugin developers, improving AMOS, the workshop module, and everything else, practically since Moodle's inception, oh man, no words!

Admiration and familiarity

are [ not always ] strangers.

-- George Sand (partially contradicted by me).

Cold numbers:

27 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 12 delayed. That's 87% success, great!

Notes:

• There was a (noticeable) number of delayed issues, some of them because interdependencies, ongoing discussions and, also, lack or time caused by the extra attention needed to prepare the September 14th releases. This week we'll try hard to reduce that list. Thanks everybody for your collaboration and patience!
• There are 32 issues awaiting peer-review, good reduction from last month's 52. Does a dozen sound like something achievable? Go, go, go!
• We are just three weeks away from Moodle 3.0 code freeze!
• A growing number of reopened issues, apparently without much activity has been detected. Maybe a good moment to review those having you with a role in them.

Hot topics:

• MDL-51357: Edit role page broken.
• MDL-34938: Enrolment expiration date now flows to metacourse parents.
• MDL-42670: Recent activity block to observe assignment blind marking.
• MDL-51245: SQL*Server drivers now do inform about incorrect transaction-settings in the database.
• MDL-50323: Better styling of unordered lists in course sections.
• And many more in areas like themes, quiz, groups, forum, course completion, chat...

Warm thanks:

• To Andrew Hancox, for his recent collaboration in various issues in the Tracker, many thanks!

Secrets are generally terrible. Beauty is

not hidden–only ugliness and deformity.

-- L.M. Montgomery

Cold numbers:

31 issues have been successfully integrated, with 12 rejected and 4 delayed - 72% success. 

Notes:

• We have been quite poor at delivering these integration updates over the last few months. It is not intentional, just all hands busy with tasks and easily forgetting. We are keen to turn that around, sorry for the interruption.
• Some recent discussions have been taking place stemming from increasing use of the new webservice/templating/js features, particularly the integration between webservices and filtering - see MDL-51213, MDL-50360 and MDL-50291
• This week was a big week on integration and we didn't get through all the issues, we thank developers and testers for their patience with our backlog!

Hot topics:

To Tony Butler for all the plugins and patches, the entire Moodle community thanks you for your work!

Maraming salamat.

Dan

Cold numbers:

24 issues have been successfully integrated with 6 rejected and 3 delayed. That's 80% success, not bad.

Notes:

• Waiting since more than 1 month ago, this week MDL-49398 should be, finally, evaluated, grrr. Sorry for the long holding period, Toni!
• There are 52 issues awaiting peer-review, it's me or this is getting bigger and bigger?
• Some good progression with pending regressions is happening, still we need to evaluate/fix/kill all them.
• We are just four weeks away from next minor releases, time to organize and fix the goals for them.

Hot topics:

• MDL-46860: File picker breaking within Atto's popup.
• MDL-51050: Stop (idiot?) browsers from populating every password field with username & password.
• MDL-50446: Problems with main-menu block resources displayed in popup/new window.
• MDL-50062: Fixed the handling of extra credit when moving between different aggregation methods in categories.
• MDL-50062: Database authentication against SQL*Server databases (via ODBC) now working.
• And many more in areas like gradebook, external tools (LTI consumer), blocks, behat tests...

Warm thanks:

• To Tomasz Muras, from Enovation Solutions, for his help both reporting and fixing multiple issues in the Tracker, much appreciated, big thanks!

Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of

all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this,

that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.

--Thomas Carlyle

Cold numbers:

12 issues have been successfully integrated, with 1 rejected and 1 delayed.

Notes:

• The iTeam this week continued some internal discussions about evolution of the Moodle performance tool to provide the goals of being more effective at detecting regressions, provide over time graphing and be able to more effectively help us with integration. More info about details from the discussion coming soon.
• Related to that, MDL-49398 continues to be analysed - the patch provides big benefits on first login performance, but at some small tradeoff of each request. Some real life dataset testing of that issue would be good, if you can help
• Our peer review queue continues to be quite large, while we've had a few quiet weeks on integration issues - lets all try and help tip that balance to keep the integration queues primed

Warm thanks:

• To Daniel Thies for much collaboration, plugins and improvements to Atto - thanks!

Cold numbers:

8 issues have been successfully integrated with 0 rejected and 1 delayed. Perfect score but because of MDL-49398 that we had to delay one more time, grrr.

Notes:

• This week we all need to put an eye on MDL-49398, looking to it from all POVs: coding, behavior and performance must be triple checked. It's hyper-core stuff and needs special attention from everybody.
• There are 47 issues awaiting peer-review, let's try to reduce the list.
• Regressions matter.
• Pending backport requests too.

Hot topics:

• MDL-50049: Lot's of old functions have been finally deprecated for Moodle 3.0. While many of them were already deprecated since ages ago (and emitting friendly debugging messages), now they are 100% out and will lead to exception/error. Be warned.
• MDL-48074: "Not in any group" option added to enrollment filters.
• MDL-49185: About to apply implied capabilities to LTI custom parameters (towards LTI 2.0 certification).
• MDL-50653: Tiny HTML validation issue that caused a more interesting MDLSITE-4117 to be created.
• And many more (4!) in areas like html editor, forums, admin...

Warm thanks:

• To Joseph Inhofer, for all his activity and collaboration in the Tracker, always looking for better solutions, many thanks!

I love people where, at the end of the day,

they'll pick up a paintbrush and paint clouds.

They can physically make things.

-- Peter Capaldi

Cold numbers:

17 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 2 delayed. That is 80.95% success, slightly below average.

Notes:

• Next Monday Moodle 2.7.9, 2.8.6 and 2.9.1 will be released. Note it's 1-week earlier than usual (2nd Monday of July). It's for a good reason...
• Next week it is the MoodleMoot Australia 2015, hosted, first time, by Moodle HQ @ Monash University, Clayton. Cool and busy days around the corner!
• There are 37 issues awaiting peer-review, any help there is really welcome.
• Regressions continue being hight priority for next releases in September.

Hot topics:

• MDL-48239: Various problems with formula calculations have been fixed.
• MDL-50675: Wikimedia repository thumbnails now properly displayed.
• MDL-50675: Cleanup of unused questions and question categories on activity deletion.
• MDL-33765: Glossary filter recursiveness and display fixes.
• And many more in areas like themes, scorm, languages, gradebook...

Warm thanks:

• To Tyler Bannister, from Remote Learner, Canada, for his collaboration with various complex issues within Moodle and, very specially, for his patience with us, integrators. Many thanks!

They say happiness is just around the corner,

too bad the world is round.

--Unknown

Cold numbers

19 issues have been successfully integrated during this 2015-06-25 cycle, with 9 rejected; no delayed issue this cycle. That is 67.86% success.

Notes

• MDL-50453 is the first PHP7-related issue. PHP 7 is not yet released, but we are looking forward to it. MDL-50565 epic has been created to ensure Moodle will be ready.
  
• Work in gradebook is advancing, there are many fixed issues and still some work in progress; more info in https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Gradebook_calculations_changes and https://docs.moodle.org/29/en/Grades_min_max
  
• 36 issues waiting for peer review, some of them waiting for a long time. Thanks for all the contributions and apologies if your patches are still waiting for feedback
  

Hot topics

• MDL-49257: Adjusting weights when extra credit item is present causes unexpected behavior
  
• MDL-50089: Gradebook export does not respect aggregate only non-empty grades for percentage and letter
  
• MDL-50491: New format_text option to exclude particular filters
  
• MDL-50283: Improve Rubric interface to include the ability to duplicate rows.
  
• MDL-50631: Display Moodle ASCII logo in CLI installer
  
• And other stuff in components like gradebook, messages, authentication...

These last weeks some other significant bug fixes and improvements were integrated:

• MDL-48618: Unexpected changes on grades after upgrade to Moodle 2.8
  
• MDL-50089: Gradebook export does not respect aggregate only non-empty grades for percentage and letter
  
• MDL-42192: Capabilities list caching
  
• MDL-49882: Essay questions are not imported into the lesson Module
  
• MDL-50176: Youtube repository no longer working
  
• And many other issues fixing or improving gradebook, administration, backup, glossary and other components
  

Warm thanks

To all the people recently and currently involved in fixing gradebook issues: Eric Merrill, Frédéric Massart, Damyon Wiese, Marina Glancy, Adrian Greeve, Martin Langhoff, Bob Puffer, Steve Miley, Helen Foster, the iTeam and all the other people that somehow contributed to the discussions and fixes.

Cold numbers:

23 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 2 delayed. That is 88.46% success, well done!

Notes:

• This is the 3rd "on-sync" week. The next integration cycle we will start processing all integration_held issues (improvements most of them).
  
• 28 issues are waiting for peer review, it is less than last week but still more than we would like.
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-50285: Grade categories calculate wrong with suspended users (Student's view)
  
• MDL-50373: Cloze questions not properly displayed in random quiz
  
• MDL-49560: SOAP web service does not work with token
  
• MDL-48664: Messaging contacts paging bar goes too wide
  
• MDL-40592: Missing user default image/picture in assignment grading page
  
• MDL-50289: Notes link on profile page despite notes being disabled
  
• And many other fixes in web services, messaging, cohorts...
  

Warm thanks:

* To Martin Mastny, for his contributions during these period in HQ and for next Friday beers

Cold numbers:

20 issues have been successfully integrated with 3 rejected and 2 delayed. That is 86.96% success, well done!

Notes:

• 2nd (out of 3) "on-sync" week. One more week and we'll start processing all the "integration_held" issues.
• While we don't usually release weeklies for security-only supported branches, this week we decided to roll a 2.7.8+ update, including a couple of bug fixes of general interest.
• There are 34 issues awaiting peer-review, any help there is really welcome.
• Regressions continue being priority #1.

Hot topics:

• MDL-50277: Make components used by Grunt fixed per branch, so all developers will get constant (and verifiable ) results.
• MDL-50177: Problems upgrading assignments.
• MDL-49764: Improved gradebook floating cells under some browsers.
• MDL-49764: Problems with behat runs caused by some libxml versions.
• MDL-50254: Mustache namespace aliasing problem
• And many more in areas like quizzes, gradebook, questions, enrolments, user management...

Warm thanks:

• To Jean-Philippe Gaudreau, for his continuous help in many areas of Moodle along the last months. Very much appreciated!

Whenever you find yourself

on the side of the majority,

it is time to pause and reflect.

-- Mark Twain

Cold numbers:

5 issues have been successfully integrated with 2 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 71.43% success, I'd say it's a really bad outcome for 3.0 first commits, eh!

Notes:

• The numbers above aren't representative enough, the release week uses to be a "light" one (integration-wise), where only a few issues are picked, so don't get worried at all.
• Last week we released 2.9, together with a good number of minor releases.
• For 3 weeks, we'll be under the called "on-sync" period where we keep the new MOODLE_29_STABLE branch 99.99% the same than master, to make it easier to introduce any urgent fix (specially upgrade steps) in a "common" way. That means that we are accumulating "integration_held" issues for 2 more weeks and only when the on-sync period is over we'll proceed to integrate them.
• There are 36 issues awaiting peer-review, let's try to reduce them.
• From now to July 6th, apart from the usual planning, sharing and discussing stages of new developments, we all should be paying special attention to every regression found with the new versions, fixing them ASAP.

Hot topics:

• The world is changing really quickly. Impossible to take a photo!
• Next Moodle major release will be 3.0, yay, excited? Nah, it's just 2.9 + 0.1 = 3.0
• MDL-50182 - About Moodle 3.0 requirements. Let's try to define them earlier than we did for 2.9 (issue closed on release, ).

Warm thanks:

• To your parents. To the parents of everybody that "produced" people like you. Given how brilliant, amazing, unique you are... I cannot but venerate your parents, kudos to all them. And congratulations to you!

We all parent the best we can.

Being human, we're ambivalent.

We want perfection for our babies,

but we also need sleep!

-- Erica Jong

Cold numbers:

54 issues have been successfully integrated with 8 rejected and 5 delayed. That is 87.10% success, not bad at all!

Notes:

• There are 35 issues awaiting peer-review, freeze is here... not good, not good.
• While you read this, freeze is happening. For the coming weeks the integration process changes noticeably.
• Because of a chained problem, CiBoT results for issues under this week integration, became broken. Sorry for the problems. It has been solved minutes ago and the checks re-executed for all the issues.

Hot topics:

• MDL-49513: New behat step to quickly configure admin settings.
• MDL-44874: $CFG->tempdir now considered shared (heads up, clusters, for 2.9 and up), and there is a new way to handle local, per-request temp directories.
• MDL-23296: Searches in the file picker.
• MDL-6340: Quiz retakes now do try harder to avoid using already seen questions.
• MDL-49514: Many libraries upgraded for Moodle 2.9.
• And lots more in areas like web services, backup & restore, lesson, html editor, acceptance tests, quizzes...

Warm thanks:

• To Zac Durber, from Moodle HQ. Quick learner, keen professional and avid moodler. That mix only can be a win. Thanks!

Preparing to fight wild fires is only part of the solution,

we must be more pro-active and prevent the fires before they start,

or reduce their intensity by removing forest waste and fuel build up.

--- Rick Renzi

Cold numbers:

39 issues have been successfully integrated with 7 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 84.78% success, not bad at all!

Notes:

• There are 32 issues awaiting peer-review, that's only 5 down from last week. And freeze is coming!
• There are only 2 remaining opportunities of getting your improvements and new features added to Moodle 2.9 (next and next-next weeks), after that, we'll be only accepting bug fixes until release, with everything else held, be warned.
• Since some days ago we are running acceptance tests (Behat) in parallel mode in our testing infrastructure. That's a huge step (thanks Rajesh!) from previous non-parallel runs and, once fully stabilized, sets the base for future improvements, stay tuned.
• We are actively discussing alternative ways to handle security issues internally, aiming to better handling of them (integration and testing) within our processes and also better/on time notifications to the community. Still considering different options and their impact.

Hot topics:

• MDL-47002, MDL-47003...: Better handling of imported content in atto html editor.
• MDL-28526: Glossary to preserve attachments and images over export/import operations.
• MDL-49543: Badges criteria now support a custom description field.
• MDL-45619: To be able to uninstall repositories.
• And lots more in areas like web services, quizzes, ajax, themes, ims-cp resources...

Warm thanks:

• To Eric Merrill, from Oakland University. For all his awesome contributions in business-critical areas like caching stores, plugins, html editors... and because I really like that avatar, man. Many thanks!

Cold numbers:

30 issues have been successfully integrated with 5 rejected and 0 delayed. That is 85.71% success, good one!

Notes:

• There are 37 issues awaiting peer-review, and 37/3.7=3+7, come on!
• Some interesting dates:
  • 2 weeks for code freeze.
  • 3 weeks for QA.
  • 7 weeks for 2.9 release.
• Funny weeks coming, make a pause and get impulse!

Hot topics:

• MDL-44367: Improve filter_data for large sites.
• MDL-40990: Question inter-dependencies.
• MDL-49152: Templates for renderers.
• MDL-49163: Unified Ajax handler.
• And lots more in areas like lesson, acceptance tests, messages, blocks...

Warm thanks:

• To Dan Poltawski, from Moodle HQ. All purpose moodler ("all terrain" I'd say in Spanish, literally, lol), because there are only 52 weeks in a year and I don't want 2015 to end without saying big thanks for your contributions and attitude. Everywhere. Always. (hats off, a pure pleasure to work with you!)

30 issues have been integrated with 4 rejected, no issues have been delayed this cycle. It is a 88.24% success.

Notes:

• Moodle will be again part of Google Summer of Code, it is a nice way to learn and contribute while you get paid: https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Applying_to_work_with_Moodle_for_GSOC
  
• 3 weeks for the Moodle 2.9 code freeze, warm up your pending major improvements
  
• Today (2015-03-13) we are doing some sensitive changes in our internal continuous integration servers, hopefully this will be the last thing you will hear about this
  
  

Hot topics:

• MDL-46064: Drop support for MyISAM for 2.9
  
• MDL-5583: allow teachers to specify certain fields in database activity as required
  
• MDL-39752: Behat tests runs in parallel
  
• MDL-49298: Make tgz backups standard
  
• And many other bug fixes and improvements in different areas: gradebook, calendar, lesson, web services, questions, ratings... 
  
  

Warm thanks:

To Stephen Bourget for his bug fixes, improvements and his dog picture. Thank you very much and please continue contributing to a better Moodle.

Cold numbers:

40 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 2 delayed. That is 91.91% success, nice one!

Notes:

• With the minor releases happening on Monday 9th, the final countdown to Moodle 2.9 has started. Check the dates!
• After a number of iterations, it seems that Behat parallel execution is ready for integration. Results are promising and it should be able to help solving some limits and problems that we are facing with acceptance testing since some time ago. More about that coming soon.

Hot topics:

• MDL-49379: Recent regression causing web services not being editable.
• MDL-47911: Improvement to gradebook operations.
• MDL-23273: Concurrency problem with choice limited responses.
• MDL-49259: Improved handling of Japanese filenames in zip files.
• And lots more in areas like lesson, blocks, web services, acceptance tests, administration...

Warm thanks:

• To Dave Cooper, from Moodle HQ. With two words, "well done!"

[*] Title rationale:

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday,
rather than spending the rest of the week
debugging Monday's code.
-- Christopher Thompson

Cold numbers

26 issues have been successfully integrated with 4 rejected and 3 delayed - 86% success.

Notes:

• This week saw the integration of the first stage the new javascript infrastructure we now have support to load AMD modules with RequireJS - see MDL-49046
  
• Next week we will be integrating for the upcoming point releases - we prepared
• Do you know that future development projects and specifications are planned to be worked on at the future Moodle Moots in the UK/Ireland (#mootieuk15) , Australia (#mootau15) and USA (#mootus15) - there should be attendees from Moodle HQ at each - see https://moodlemoot.org for more details

Hot topics

• MDL-35392 - Feedback from module assign is not shown in the gradebook
  
• MDL-31578 - Shibboleth attribute mappings for all Moodle fields (inclusive custom attributes)
  
• MDL-18177 - Add option to choose whether groups and/or groupings are included in a back up
  
• MDL-49046 - RequireJS AMD Javascript loader
  

Warm thanks

To Tony Levi for collaboration and research into Moodle issues - especially identifying performance issues. Thanks!

cheers,

Dan