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Thanks to everyone who took part in the Moodle 2 Theme Contest and congratulations to Caroline Kennedy for designing the winning theme, Splash.

Splash is cleanly coded, makes creative use of the Moodle 2 theme engine and was highly rated by the community.

Caroline’s theme will be included in Moodle 2.0 together with other cool Moodle 2 Theme Contest submissions.

Many thanks to Moodle Partner NewSchool Learning for sponsoring and running the contest.

Hi all!

I thought it was time to crawl out of my cave and post a little update here on how things are going with Moodle 2.0.

All of us working on Moodle 2.0 core are still plugging away hard on development. We're responding to all the feedback from people helping to test the series of Moodle 2.0 Preview Releases we've been doing (eg see the notes for Preview Release 4), and fixing hundreds of bugs and rough edges in the new features.

(I'd also like to announce that we are launching our first formal cycle of functional QA testing today, which is a great milestone for us. See Helen's recent post in Testing and QA forum and the QA testing page in the docs for details.)

If all goes well, it's looking like we should be able to hit a usable and feature-complete state for Moodle 2.0 in a couple of weeks, around July 20. You can follow the the main blockers in the tracker to see progress towards this. Unfortunately, I don't think we can call that a final release yet, because the testing period for much of it has not been long enough, so at this point we'll call it Moodle 2.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1).

This code will still not be a recommended upgrade for all sites, but if you are an experienced Moodle admin able to dive into PHP if required, and you urgently require the Moodle 2 features, and you find it works well enough for your particular use of Moodle, then the risk will be manageable. The APIs and Database will be completely frozen and most issues should be relatively cosmetic.

Testing and polishing will continue for probably another month or two, focusing on consistency, correctness and performance. This will also be a great window for developers to update their contributed plugins, as we'll be improving the documentation for core APIs with more examples of best practice for the new Moodle 2 platform.

Thanks for your patience everyone! We are getting close!

Cheers,
Martin (Founder and Lead Developer)

There are lots of Moodle conferences, or MoodleMoots as they are often called, coming up in the next 6 months:

• 6th French MoodleMoot - Troyes, France, 28-30 June (#mootfr10)
• MoodleMoot Italia 2010 - Bari, Italy, 2-3 July (#mootIT10)
  
• MoodleMoot AU 2010 - Melbourne, Australia, 11-14 July (#mootau10)
• US West Coast MoodleMoot 2010 - San Jose, CA, USA, 20-23 July
• US Midwest MoodleMoot - Goshen, IN, USA, 26-28 July (#mootusin10)
• MoodleMoot Austin - Austin, Texas, USA, 2-3 August (#atxmoot10)
• Moodlemoot Colombia 2010 - Bogotá, Colombia, 17-18 August
  
• International Moodle Conference - Essen, Germany, 16-17 September (#mootDE10e)
• Polish MoodleMoot - Czestochowa, Poland, 4-5 November (#mootPL10)
• MoodleMoot Spain 2010 - La Rioja, Spain, 11-13 November

If you're organising a Moodle event and would like it added to the moodle.org calendar, please let me know and/or post in the announcements forum in the Moodle Conference Centre.

(Edited by Helen Foster to add additional dates - original submission Wednesday, 23 June 2010, 02:29 PM)

We recently released Moodle 1.9.9 and Moodle 1.8.13 for your Moodling pleasure.

Apart from a range of bug fixes and small improvements, four security vulnerabilities (2 critical, 1 major and 1 minor) have been discovered and fixed since Moodle 1.9.8. (Thanks as usual to the reporters and to all the team responsible for fixing and publicising these serious issues).

WE RECOMMEND ALL MOODLE SITES UPGRADE THEIR SITES TO ONE OF THESE VERSIONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

As per our usual release procedure, over 46,000 admins of registered Moodle sites were already directly notified nearly a week ago.

Upgrading from 1.9.x or 1.8.x should be a very straightforward affair for most Moodle users as there are no new features. Full details about the releases can be found in the Moodle 1.9.9 release notes and the Moodle 1.8.13 release notes.

The releases themselves are available, as always, from our downloads page or any of our CVS mirrors.

Cheers,
Martin (back to Moodle 2.0!)

Are you into Moodle theme design? If so, how about entering the Moodle 2 Theme Contest run by Moodle Partner NewSchool Learning. The winner of the contest will receive an Apple iPad and all the best themes will be included in the Moodle 2.0 release!

Documentation on the new Moodle 2.0 theme engine is available in Moodle Docs - Development:Themes 2.0 - and if you have any comments or questions you're welcome to join the discussions in the Themes forum.

Full details of the contest, including information on how to enter, may be found here: Moodle 2 Theme Contest. Good luck with designing your Moodle 2.0 themes!