Congratulations to Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder and lead developer, for winning the award of Best Education Enabler at the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards ceremony at OSCON yesterday.

The Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards are presented to individuals for dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source.

Martin is now listed, together with the other 2008 award winners, in the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards - Hall of Fame.

We recently packaged a new release for the current 1.9 version of Moodle, as well as new releases for older 1.8, 1.7 and 1.6 versions.

Each of the new releases contains long lists of minor bug fixes (see the release notes for details). Thanks to all the developers and users who helped with finding and fixing these.

Several security vulnerabilities were also fixed in all versions, making it important that you upgrade existing Moodle sites.

Even if you can't make major upgrades in the near future, you should at least upgrade to the latest stable package for your version. (For example if you have 1.8 already, then it's very safe and easy to upgrade it to the new 1.8.6 because there are no new features, just bug fixes)

All releases are available, as usual, from the Moodle download site.

Thanks to everyone who nominated Moodle for a SourceForge.net Community Choice Award, which resulted in Moodle being a finalist in the Best Project for Educators category.

Please vote now for Moodle to win the Best Project for Educators award!

You can also vote for Moodle to win the "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously Accused of Patent Violation" award.

Looking at our calendar it looks like October is Moodlemonth this year!

- Moodlemoot AU 2008 - Brisbane, Australia, October 1-3

- Moodlemoot BR 2008 - Brazil, October 3-4

- Moodlemoot NZ 2008 - Napier, NZ, October 8-10

- Moodlemajlis Oman 2008 - Muscat, Oman, October 18-20

- Moodlemoot Italy 2008 - Rome, Italy, October 21-22

- Moodlemoot ES 2008 - Barcelona, Spain, October 23-24


If you haven't been to one before (or even if you have) then I highly recommend coming along to one and meeting other Moodlers in person.

(Edited by Helen Foster to update links - original submission Wednesday, 2 July 2008, 09:10 AM)

The mail server that processes all email from moodle.org was taken offline by a freak explosion at our ISP:

http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/06/01/1715247.shtml

As a result all email from this site (copies of forum postings and messages, as well as signup emails) was lost for a period of 36 hours or so.

Everything should be OK now, but if you're waiting for a signup email you might want to try signing up again. Please contact us via support@moodle.org if you continue seeing problems here.

Do you think Moodle is the Best Project for Educators? Or the Best Project for the Enterprise?

If so, please nominate us for one or more SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards.

You'll need to create an account on SourceForge.net in order to make a nomination, but once you've done so, you'll be able to nominate Moodle for several award categories, including a "Most Likely to Be Ambiguously Accused of Patent Violation" category.

Moodle 1.9.1 was recently released and is recommended as an upgrade for all Moodle users.

There were no security bugs but over 400 issues were dealt with and there are a few minor new features, such as support for captcha during email registration. Thanks very much to our core team doing most of the work, as well the generous support of the community who helped with testing and reporting. See the release notes for some highlights.

As always, get it from the download page or your local CVS mirror.

Cheers,
Martin

Congratulations and welcome to our twelve Google Summer of Code 2008 students, who will be working on Moodle projects over the next 3-4 months.

We chose the following students and projects:

• Andrei Băutu - XMLDB/SQLite
• Sarveswaran Kengatharaiyer - Competency tracking
• David Knight - Automatic accessibility checking
• Grady Laksmono - Moodle IDE
• Laia Subirats Maté - Detecting and solving specific usability issues
• Avi Mehta - Web 2.0 language editing interface
• Joey Morwick - Blog improvements
• Luis Rodrigues - Messaging improvements
• Askar Salimbaev - Secure RSS feeds
• Daniel Servos - Animated grade statistics report
• Akshit Sharma - New customisable theme
• Chris Zubak-Skees - Feed aggregation library

For further details about the projects, see the GSOC/2008 page in Moodle Docs.

Please give our new Moodle developers help and encouragement wherever you can!