To our community,

As a precautionary measure in response to the PHP2SHELL vulnerability, which was made public on October 21, 2026, Moodle HQ made the decision to take our sites offline. You may notice that our public facing sites were inaccessible for a period of time, but are back online or coming back online now.

Patches to address this vulnerability have been released. We have patched this site and brought it back online. We are continuing to deploy and validate the patches on our other public facing and client sites and will continue to bring sites back online as quickly as possible.

We strongly encourage self-hosted site holders to notify the individual(s) responsible for updating PHP for their sites and to create a plan to update your PHP with the released security patches, immediately.

Unpatched sites remain vulnerable to potential exploits related to PHP2SHELL.

The Moodle HQ Team

Hi Everyone,
We’re pleased to announce the release of Moodle LMS 5.3 LTS.

This release helps educators create learning with intent, with stronger tools for connecting learning to outcomes, more flexible assessment and feedback, and a clearer, more intuitive interface.

Moodle LMS 5.3 reflects the work and ideas of people across our global community, partners, and Moodle teams. A huge thank you to everyone who tested, contributed, shared feedback, and helped shape this release.

Here’s what’s new in Moodle LMS 5.3

🎯 Design learning with intent

New learning outcomes capabilities help educators connect what learners are expected to achieve with how learning is delivered and assessed. Expanded marking workflows also support multiple markers, individual feedback, moderation, and sample marking.

Why this matters: Design learning around meaningful outcomes while supporting more flexible, robust assessment and feedback.

✨ A clearer, more current interface

Refreshed typography and layouts, improved course page hierarchy, more intuitive navigation, and Previous and Next controls make courses clearer and easier to navigate. Moodle LMS 5.3 also introduces dark mode in the Boost theme, one of the community’s most-requested features.

Why this matters: Reduce distractions and help educators and learners focus on teaching and learning, not navigating the platform.

🤖 More choice and visibility for AI

Anthropic joins the AI providers supported in core, while new course-level AI usage reporting gives teachers and learners greater visibility into their AI use.

Why this matters: Get more choice in how AI fits your learning environment, with greater transparency into how it’s being used.

Other improvements

Moodle LMS 5.3 also includes improvements across everyday teaching, administration, and the underlying platform, including:

• Better tools for teaching and content creation: New Quiz due dates, Question bank improvements, and additional content creation options.
• More useful reporting and administration: More flexible reporting, background processing for resource-intensive tasks, and improved Global Search.
• Stronger integrations: New OAuth2 support for web services provides a modern, secure way to connect Moodle LMS with other systems.
• Long-term support: Moodle LMS 5.3 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, with an extended security support period to give organisations more flexibility when planning upgrades.

Explore the New features documentation for a full overview or the developer update for more technical details.

Try Moodle LMS 5.3 on MoodleCloud Today

Want to try the new release for yourself? New MoodleCloud signups and trials are now running Moodle LMS 5.3.

👉 Start a MoodleCloud trial

Join us live: Learning with intent

Join us on Thursday, 15 October 2026 at 2:00 pm CEST for Learning with intent: Inside Moodle LMS 5.3.

We’ll explore the thinking behind 5.3 and take a closer look at learning outcomes, assessment and feedback, the refreshed interface, and what these changes mean in practice.

🗓️ Register now for the free webinar. Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.

Thank you for being part of the Moodle community and thank you for all of your contributions.

Kind regards,
Matt Porritt
Product Director, Platform Solutions

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Hello Moodle community,

We're excited to announce that our Moodle 5.3 QA cycle begins today, August 31st, and will run for five weeks until the release date on October 5th.

About the QA Cycle

The QA cycle is an important part of Moodle's release process. During this time, the community helps test new functionality and verify fixes to ensure the next Moodle version is stable, reliable, and ready for release.

First Time Joining a QA Cycle?

No worries! We have put together a guide for first time testers that walks you through getting set up, picking up your first test, and reporting a result.

What's New in Moodle 5.3

There are lots of cool new features and improvements coming in 5.3, including linear course navigation, marking workflows, a refreshed look and feel and forum updates, and we're also saying goodbye to the Classic theme, leaving Boost as the only theme bundled with the LMS.

Your Reports Turn Into Fixes

Issues found by community testers during a QA cycle are tagged with the qa_identified label so we can track them through to a fix. A number of those have been resolved during the 5.3 cycle, including:

• MDL-70225 - Simple global search now matches the start of words
• MDL-88393 - Performance issue when upgrading due to a question bank upgrade step
• MDL-88432 - Single quotes in a search query returned no results on MSSQL
• MDL-83815 - Unable to remove a forum rating or set it to none

More are on their way, including MDL-74915, which adds an obvious way to reach the course calendar page.

How You Can Help

• Execute MDLQA manual tests assigned to this cycle
• Perform exploratory testing on the QA testing site
• Report any issues you discover in the Moodle Tracker
• For detailed instructions, please see the QA testing guide

Important Reminders

• Please only assign tests to yourself if you plan to execute them within the next few days.
• If you're unable to complete a test, please press cancel testing so other testers can pick it up.
• Comment and report results on the cloned test for this QA cycle, not the original MDLQA parent test. Double-check that both the Fix Version and Affected Versions fields are set to Moodle 5.3 and not "Original - DO NOT REPORT TEST RESULTS HERE".

Thank you for helping improve Moodle and contributing to the quality of the Moodle 5.3 release 🚀