Moodle 2.7 has been released. The upgrade to the free and open source learning management system includes new themes with improved responsive design, a new accessibility-focused text editor and more. These are just the minimum supported versions. In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, security vulnerabilities have been discovered and fixed. We highly recommend that you upgrade your sites as soon as possible. Upgrading should be very straightforward. As per our usual policy, admins of all registered Moodle sites will be notified of security issue details directly via email and we'll publish details more widely in a week.
Moodle 2.7 brings a few headline feature improvements, including the replacement of the TinyMCE editor with ‘Atto’ and the continued emphasis on responsive design with ‘Clean’ the default theme and the new ‘More’ theme being released. Compared to a number of earlier Moodle releases though, some might question whether there is a compelling reason to upgrade to Moodle 2.7 (especially if you have only recently upgraded to Moodle 2.6).
And here’s Top new features of Moodle 2.7:
Clean and Responsive Design
Moodle 2.7 has two core themes; Clean and More. Clean is the responsive bootstrap based theme which has now been made the default theme. More is a completely new, customisable theme, created for the novice user or administrators who are unable to access theme files on the server.
New Text Editor, Atto
In the latest release of Moodle, they have named the text editor ‘Atto’, the new Atto feature allows tighter integration with Moodle meaning there are enhancements to usability and accessibility like never before.
Mobile Notifications. This is possibly the most exciting new feature to enable ‘push’ learning to users on the go. The essential tool for Learning and Development professions in marketing the platform, this new feature will allow you to push notifications about new learning modules created within Moodle which your learners can take advantage of on the go.
Improved quiz reports and other general improvements to quizzes and question banks, such as the ability to duplicate a question with a single click, the ability to require an attachment for essay questions and the ability to save changes and continue editing;
Improved Scheduling System. Administrators can now schedule, more precisely routine tasks, by specifying the minute/hour/day or month the task is to be run.
First long term support release: 3 years until May 2017 for security and data loss bug fixes .
Easily create and manage Quiz & Question bank. As well as an updated question type selector, duplicating and moving questions is now easier, and there is an option to 'Save changes and continue editing'.
Install the new Moodle software manually
1. First, Move your old Moodle software program files to another location. Do NOT copy new files over the old files.
2. Then, Unzip or unpack the upgrade file so that all the new Moodle software program files are in the location the old files used to be in on the server. Moodle will adjust SQL and moodledata if it needs to in the upgrade.Copy your old config.php file back to the new Moodle directory.
3. As mentioned above, if you had installed any plugins on your site you should add them to the new code tree now. It is important to check that you get the correct version for your new version of Moodle. Be particularly careful that you do not overwrite any code in the new version of Moodle.
4. Do not forget to copy over your moodledata folder / directory. If you don't you will get a "fatal error $cfg- dataroot is not configured properly".