Moodle 1.7 is released!

Moodle 1.7 is released!

by Martin Dougiamas.

We're proud to announce the latest major version of Moodle fresh from the oven: Moodle 1.7 !

The four big headline features are:

• Roles - Moodle has a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions. It's very flexible, allowing you to give just a single person the right to delete posts in one particular forum, if you want that! Thanks to Open University for sponsoring Moodle HQ in this development!
  
• XML database schema - Moodle now supports a single way of specifying database structures using XML, which not only makes development a lot easier for programmers, but allows us to support a wider range of databases. One of our frequent requests is now a reality - in addition to MySQL and PostgreSQL, Moodle can now run out of the box on Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle (with more databases to come). Thanks to Microsoft for sponsoring Moodle HQ in this development!
  
• New admin interface - admins get a productivity boost with a new interface designed to make it much easier to find settings and configure Moodle properly. Thanks to Google for sponsoring most of this development!
  
• Unit testing framework - developers can now easily write unit tests that can be run as part of a system check to make sure Moodle code is performing as expected. As Moodle grows this will really help us maintain certain levels of quality. Thanks to Open University for contributing this!
  

There are plenty of other smaller features and fixes created by developers and testers from all over the place (thanks!!). You can find out all the details from the Release notes in our comprehensive Moodle Docs. (Some of the documentation for 1.7 is still catching up!)

Of course, you can download Moodle as always from our Moodle Download server.

Enjoy! Good luck with all your Moodle sites and wish us well for Moodle 1.8 (already well under way!)

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