by Helen Foster.  

Are you interested in learning more about Moodle programming? If so, please enrol on our new course - Introduction to Moodle Programming.

The Introduction to Moodle Programming course has been developed at Humboldt State University in collaboration with staff at San Francisco State University, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Many thanks to all the developers involved, and for allowing the course to be hosted on our new moodle.org site - Moodle Developer Courses.

by Martin Dougiamas.  

It's been some years since Moodle.org had a facelift but today I finally switched over to our new "Moodle2" theme.

It's far from perfect yet, but it's usable and we hope you like it better than the old theme.

Some of the things still being worked on over the next couple of weeks are:

• better artwork for the front page and the other top-level content
• creating versions of the same theme and menus on Moodle Docs and Moodle Tracker
• adding a few more things to the menus
• translating all the top level pages and menus into every language we support (the texts will be included in all standard language packs)
• fixing a few small accessibility issues
• any other suggestions you come up with (MDLSITE-132)

Thanks to Helen and Julian and many others for their help and suggestions with the theme and menus, and especially Urs who came up with most of the new "look" and code. Cheers guys.

by Helen Foster.  

We're currently looking for an experienced system administrator/developer to work with us as part of the core development team on-site at Moodle HQ in Perth.

If you're looking for a Moodle-related job, or have a vacancy you'd like to advertise, be sure to visit our growing Moodle Jobs database.

Update: Thanks to everyone who applied for this position, which has now been filled.

(Edited by Helen Foster to add update - original submission Wednesday, 17 December 2008, 09:17 PM)

by Helen Foster.  

A big thank you to SCORM module maintainers Piers Harding and Dan Marsden for the many recent SCORM module improvements, and to everyone who has helped by participating in the SCORM module forum discussions and posting bugs in the tracker. There are now less than 20 unresolved SCORM issues!

SCORM 1.2 is supported in Moodle 1.9.3 and Moodle 1.8.7 onwards. The next aim (dependent, as always, on funding) is for Moodle to support SCORM 2004.

For further information about the SCORM module, please see the SCORM module documentation and the SCORM FAQ.

by Martin Dougiamas.  

We recently packaged a new maintenance release for the current 1.9 version of Moodle, as well as new maintenance releases for older 1.8, 1.7 and 1.6 versions.

Each of the new releases contains long lists of minor bug fixes (see the release notes for details). As usual, many thanks to all the developers and users who helped with finding and fixing these.

Several security vulnerabilities were also fixed in all versions, making it important that you upgrade existing Moodle sites.

Even if you can't make major upgrades in the near future, you should at least upgrade to the latest stable package for your version. (For example if you have 1.8 already, then it's very safe and easy to upgrade it to the new 1.8.7 because there are no new features, just bug fixes)

All releases are available, as usual, from the Moodle download site.

by Helen Foster.  

As the statistics show, our community continues to grow rapidly. We have over 1,500 new users registering each day. Congratulations to our 500,000th registered user, who wins a T-shirt from the Moodle Shop.

by Helen Foster.  

Congratulations to Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder and lead developer, for winning the award of Best Education Enabler at the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards ceremony at OSCON yesterday.

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source.

Martin is now listed, together with the other 2008 award winners, in the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards - Hall of Fame.

by Martin Dougiamas.  

We recently packaged a new release for the current 1.9 version of Moodle, as well as new releases for older 1.8, 1.7 and 1.6 versions.

Each of the new releases contains long lists of minor bug fixes (see the release notes for details). As usual, huge thanks to all the developers and users who helped with finding and fixing these.

Several security vulnerabilities were also fixed in all versions, making it important that you upgrade existing Moodle sites.

Even if you can't make major upgrades in the near future, you should at least upgrade to the latest stable package for your version. (For example if you have 1.8 already, then it's very safe and easy to upgrade it to the new 1.8.6 because there are no new features, just bug fixes)

All releases are available, as usual, from the Moodle download site.