Hello!
I'm writing to you from the Moodle Majlis in Muscat, Oman, where we just had several days of Moodle community goodness.
The big news right now is that Moodle 2.6 is now finally available for download! (see our download site or your local git wizard)
It's been a long six months - time to take a breath and look at all the things that our community has produced! Over 120 developers worldwide (and about 20 in Moodle HQ) have coding credits in this release.
This release contains hundreds of improvements and fixes that address requests from the community, but the major ones fall into two basic categories: usability improvements that improve how Moodle functions from a user point of view and performance improvements that allow Moodle to run faster and better in a wider range of software environments.
- Usability improvements: improved responsive behaviour for all types of devices, clean new course editing interfaces, annotation of PDF assignment submissions, improved course management, a more user-friendly text editor, additional name fields, a new course format that lets you make a course out of any single activity, support for non-Gregorian calendars and much more.
- Performance improvements: new options for handling sessions using backends like memcached, full support for PHP OPcache, faster admin menus, improvements on MS SQL and Maria DB and more.
For more details on these see the official Moodle 2.6 release notes, or browse our Moodle 2.6 New Features page which has nice screenshots.
Something new for this release is a series of videos we've made to show some of the main new features - we hope you enjoy them!
Thank you again to all the developers, testers, managers, integrators, designers, communicators, hackers, builders, critics, thinkers, teachers, students, administrators and who continue to contribute to the ongoing development of our learning platform that has changed the world. Thank you all.
So take the plunge with 2.6 (before we get stuck into the challenges of 2.7 )
Cheers,
Martin