Moodle 1.9.5 and Moodle 1.8.9 are now available

by Martin Dougiamas.  

I'm pleased to announce the latest stable releases of 1.8.x and 1.9.x are now available, as usual, from our Moodle download page.

Here are the release notes with full details for Moodle 1.9.5 and Moodle 1.8.9.

There are many small bug fixes and some new features in each release, but the main two things you need to know about are the gradebook interface changes in 1.9.5 and some important security issues.

1) GRADEBOOK CHANGES IN 1.9.5

We usually avoid making significant changes to the Moodle interface within a particular branch version of Moodle for very good reasons. However, there were several major problems with the gradebook in versions 1.9 to 1.9.4 that made it difficult for many teachers to use and it is these problems that 1.9.5 is trying to address.

Full details of the Gradebook improvements in Moodle 1.9.5.

As an admin, you have some new config options to turn things on and off, but some of the interfaces will look permanently different to how they were in 1.9.4 and before.

Please make sure that your teachers are not surprised by the changes when you upgrade to 1.9.5. You may want to explicitly contact them and explain the differences.

2) SECURITY FIXES IN 1.9.5 and 1.8.9

Four serious vulnerabilities (five including the TeX bug that was already announced) have been discovered and fixed recently. (Thanks as usual to the reporters and to Petr Skoda for his tireless and excellent work defending all our Moodle sites).

There are no reported exploits yet, and they do not affect all sites, but we still recommend that you upgrade your sites to these latest versions as soon as possible (or otherwise ensure that these issues are not active in your site).

Full information about these vulnerabilities can be found on the security news page.

If you need help with upgrading or anything else please see the Moodle support page.

Cheers and thank you for using Moodle! (We are still working hard on 2.0!)