Moodle minor release is here, with some features you’d want to know about!

March 20, 2018

Heads up Moodlers.

Moodle 3.4.2 (and 3.3.5) are now available at download.moodle.org.

As mentioned by our Open Source Development Coordinator, Sander Bangma, in his moodle.org post a couple of weeks back, the new minor version of Moodle comes with two important additions, which we would like to share again today.

GDPR functionality

Recently, we revealed our plans for supporting Moodle sites to become GDPR compliant.

The first iteration of our GDPR feature set has now been made available on the plugin database.

The features are implemented in two different plugins;

    • The first plugin (Policy plugin) provides a new user sign on process, with ability to define multiple policies (site, privacy, third party), track user consents, and manage updates and versioning of the policies;
    • The second plugin (Data Privacy plugin) implements the workflow for users to submit subject access requests and for site administrators and privacy officers to process these requests. This plugin will be further extended to include functionality for data erasure requests and the data registry to define a purpose and retention period for data stored in a Moodle site.

Minor releases 3.4.2 and 3.3.5 include the following core API changes that are required to support the GDPR plugins:

  • An age and location check to identify minors;
  • the API to request personal data from all plugins;
  • implementation of the API for a subset of Moodle core plugins so far.

Those wanting to explore and use the new plugins should therefore upgrade to either Moodle 3.4.2 or 3.3.5.

All GDPR functionality will be integrated in the Moodle 3.5 release. The plugins will remain available to assist those using Moodle 3.3 or 3.4 with their GDPR compliance.

Read the full announcement from our Open Source Development Coordinator, Sander Bangma.

Google’s reCAPTCHA engine v2

Our minor releases now includes support for Google’s reCaptcha engine v2.
What does this mean? Well, as you might know, reCAPTCHA is a free service from Google that helps protect websites from spam and abuse.

A “CAPTCHA” is a turing test to tell human and bots apart. It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” and other malicious software to figure out.

You might have been seeing notices informing you that any calls to reCAPTCHA v1 API will not work after 31 March.

Hence the support for reCAPTCHA v2 for Moodle sites in our minor release, making sure that you will be able use this protection service test in your Moodle (for sign ups etc.) past the end of this month.

Moodle Mobile 3.4.2 also released!

We are also pleased to announce that yesterday we also released a new version of the Moodle Mobile App and Desktop to support the two important features in Moodle 3.4.2 as mentioned above and re-iterated below:

  • Google reCaptcha v2
  • An age and location check to identify minors

You can download the updated version of Moodle Mobile 3.4.2 on Apple App Store or on Google Play.

Moodle Desktop 3.4.2 can also be accessed via download.moodle.org

Want to continue to staying up to date with the core development of Moodle?

Make sure you subscribe to our General Developer Forum or subscribe to our regular e-newsletter or stay in touch via our social media channels.

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Google+
Linkedin