Moodle 1.7 is released

Moodle 1.7 has been released. Moodle is a course management system (also called a learning management system) and used by educators to build online learning communities.

The five most significant features added to Moodle according to the release notes are:

  • Roles - Moodle has a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions. Permissions based on fine-grained capabilities allow all kinds of roles to be created and assigned in all contexts around Moodle. This creates a great deal more flexibility in the permissions that you can grant to people.
  • XML database schema - In addition to MySQL and PostGreSQL, Moodle also supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.
  • New administrative interface - A new admin interface with accessible design and cool features to make access to settings fast and easy.

Top three blogs on Drupal 5.0

If you have not heard, Drupal 5.0 went into beta last week. I had intended to write a little bit about the new features users can expect with this new version of the content management system. However, I've been so busy with a couple IT projects as well as some family events that I have not had time to even touch Drupal 5 beta 1.

Luckily, there are smarter and more dedicated people out there already posting about anything I could say about Drupal 5. The following are links to what I consider as the top three blog posts on Drupal 5.0:

PHP 5.2.0 is available

The start of November is big news for users and developers of PHP applications with the release of PHP 5.2 on the 2nd of the month. According to the release announcement, this "release is a major improvement in the 5.X series, which includes a large number of new features, bug fixes and security enhancements".

Significant features of PHP 5.2 include:

  • New memory manager for the Zend Engine with improved performance and a more accurate memory usage tracking.
  • Input filtering extension was added and enabled by default.
  • JSON extension was added and enabled by default.
  • ZIP extension for creating and editing zip files was introduced.
  • Hooks for tracking file upload progress were introduced.
  • Introduced E_RECOVERABLE_ERROR error mode.
  • Introduced DateTime and DateTimeZone objects with methods to manipulate date/time information.
  • Upgraded bundled SQLite, PCRE libraries.
  • Upgraded OpenSSL, MySQL and PostgreSQL client libraries for Windows installations.
  • Many performance improvements.
  • Over 200 bug fixes.