Category: News

Hello everyone,

Moodle 4.0.2, 3.11.8, and 3.9.15 were released today.

As usual, you can find the releases via our download channels (https://download.moodle.org or Git).

We recommend you upgrade your Moodle sites where possible, to benefit from the bug-fixes and security improvements.

We have been migrating over to a new documentation system and so we will be linking to those from now on.
The release notes for each version can be found on the following pages:

• Moodle 4.0.2 release notes 
• Moodle 3.11.8 release notes 
• Moodle 3.9.15 release notes 

Please see the releases page for more details.

The Drupal tempstore.private service is used to allow temporary user data that is available from one web request to the next. It is intended to be used for non-cache data that cannot easily be rebuild. This includes work in progress data that isn’t in the position to be saved permanently.

The temporary store is a key value/store and cam therefore store anything from a single vale to a serialised object.

The tempstore.private service is really a factory (called PrivateTempStoreFactory) that will allow you to create instance of a PrivateTempStore object. It’s this object that van be used to manage the data in the store. If you are familiar with the way that configuration factories work then this will seem familiar.

Using the temporary storage is quite straightforward, the service has a get() method that takes the name of the temporary store you want to use. What you call it is up to you, but it is best to namespace this so that you can easily tell where the temporary store came from. You can also add information like whatsort of temporay store you are using, but don’t add any user identifyable information for the key.

Once the PrivateTempStore object has been created you can then use it to set whatever data you might want to set.

/** @var DrupalCoreTempStorePrivateTempStore $store */
$store = Drupal::service('tempstore.private')->get('mymodule');
$store->set('var_name', $data);

To get the data back again just use the get() method.

Read more.

If you contribute to Free/Open Source Software,
please take the
FOSS Contributor Survey!

This survey is a collaboration between the Linux Foundation’s Core
Infrastructure Initiative and the Laboratory for Innovation Science
at Harvard. Some of the questions are specific to those who write
software; if you contribute, but don’t write software, just skip
those questions.
The goal is to get a better understanding about its development so that
we can best work out how to improve its security and sustainability.

Also: please tell others who develop this software about the survey!

One interesting complication about this survey is that it’s difficult to
get the word out about such a general survey.
People talk about the “open source software community”, but in practice
there isn’t one such community, there are many communities
with some overlap.
I don’t want to spam people who have never expressed any interest
in information like this.

I’m currently talking with some folks in the Linux Foundatinon leadership
about sending a one-time email only to developers who are
already signed up for Linux Foundation mailing lists
that are focused on developing open source software.
We don’t want to spam people, but I think it’s reasonable to believe
that people on those mailing lists are interestd in information
related to the development of open source software.
One problem with sending to multiple mailing lists is that we don’t want
to annoy people by having them receive multiple copies, so we want
to work out a way so an individual only gets one copy.

I’ve never done this before, and I hate spam myself.
So I’m first checking with Linux Foundation leaders and program
managers to see if they think this is reasonable.
I think it is, but it’s easy to justify anything to yourself, so
I’m waiting to hear from others about what they think.

So getting back to the point –
if you contribute to Free/Open Source Software,
please take the
FOSS Contributor Survey!