Sakai 2.5 Release Highlights
- Summaries
- |#Jira Details - Jira filters for fixes and enhancements tentatively planned for Sakai 2.5.
Cross-Project Activities
Accessibility WG
- Outcomes from 2.4 accessibility review influenced many changes and improvements for 2.5.
Internationalization WG
- Currently Available
- Arabic
- English/UK (new)
- Catalan
- Simplified Chinese (updated)
- Dutch (updated)
- French/Canadian (updated)
- Japanese (updated)
- Korean (updated)
- Portuguese/Brazilian (new)
- Portuguese/Portuguese (updated)
- Russian (new)
- Spanish (updated)
- Swedish
- Translation Underway (will be merged to maintenance branch when ready)
- Traditional Chinese
- Danish
- French/France
- German
- Hebrew
- Mongolian
- Slovakian
- Turkish
- Vietnamese
/wiki/spaces/UI/overview
- "More Tab" improvements from FLUID project.
- Support for Tool icons.
- iFrame-less Accessible portal (PDA Portal).
Tools
Account
- Option to sync user data between Account and Profile tools.
Assignments
- Allow grading for students that have not posted any submissions.
- Non-electronic submission type.
- Notifications for new submissions.
- Upload all.
- Reordering of assignments (like Resources).
- Improved Assignments-Gradebook integration.
Attachment Widget
- Changed default security setting for viewing attachments from secuirty-by-obscurity to forcing a user to login first.
Chat Room
- Ability to delete all chat history for a given room.
Citations Helper
- Import citations in RIS format from other tools such as RefWorks and Endnote.
- Sort citation lists by author, title, or date.
- Search for and embed citations from within the WYSIWYG Editor (FCKeditor); similar to Twin Peaks.
Forums
- Ability to delete forum messages.
- Added synoptic views for Home.
- (Separated out from MessageCenter previously in 2.4.)
Help
- Support for help content in multiple languages.
- Added sakai.properties setting to hide help collections.
- Added tool registration property to register additional help collections.
- Updates to help content from Indiana University (IU) Knowledge Base for 2.5 functionality (as provided by project leads and IU KB team).
Gradebook
- Support for categories and weighted categories.
- New grade entry types: percentages and letter grades.
- Import grades using a downloaded spreadsheet template.
- Individual student grade reports for instructors.
- Enable an instructor to "see what a student sees".
- Allow export course grades in addition to export gradebook.
- Blank grades now treated as null (rather than previous treatment as 0).
- Introduction of grader permissions (ie grading by group and/or section)
- Usability enhancements in workflow and layout.
Messages
- Ability to bulk Move and Delete Message.
- Ability to forward Messages.
- Added synoptic views for Home.
- (Separated out from MessageCenter previously in 2.4.)
Portfolio (OSP)
- Promoted from Provisional to Cores status.
- New XSLT portal.
- Aggregated View of Matrix and Portfolios.
- Expanded sharing capabilities for Portfolios.
- Many user interface bug fixes and improvements.
- Group-aware matrices.
- Assignment references within Matrix/Wizards.
Profile
- Option to sync user data between Account and Profile tools.
Resources
- Replaced dropdown widget for Add and Action menus with an accessible one.
- Dropboxes
- Students and Instructors can now choose to email each other when they upload to a Dropbox.
- Instructors can now see a visual indication of which folders contain recently updated content.
- Removal of inappropriate options from Dropbox interface.
- (See also |#Content below.)
Roster
- New UI with a separate tabular view for profile and official institutional photos.
- Integration with Course Management API to display enrollment status information.
- Expanded permission scheme to retain the Roster's general use purpose while incorporating course-specific features.
- Significant performance improvements.
Schedule
- Performance improvements to reduce memory load of schedules with a large number of items.
- iCal subscription export service and import; reoccurring events are not yet supported. (ical.experimental=true)
Section Info
- Download or print a roster list that provides each student's section memberships.
- Better enforcement of the maximum section size.
Tests & Quizzes, a.k.a. Samigo
- Promoted from Provisional to Core status.
- Allow ability to move/copy/remove multiple questions to other pools.
- Allow ability to adjust score in edit assessment screen.
- Allow ability to remove published assessments.
- Add event logging for user operations.
- Allow copying of all questions in a part to a selected pool.
- Allow students' responses to be exported to Excel.
- Allow point values of questions to be reset when a random draw from pool part is created; all questions from the pool are copied to the part.
Framework/Kernel Services
Content Hosting Service
- Improved performance by rewriting underlying Storage of entities to reduce memory usage and CPU load,
- Refactoring of database to eliminate bottlenecks in the underlying content hosting service.
- Preliminary support for the integration of JSR-170 repositories
- (See also |#Resources above.)
Content Review
- Minor changes in APIs and to integration with Assignments; only applicable to sites running a content review implementation (e.g., Turnitin).
Database
- Addition of a faster lower memory footprint entity parser based on SAX.
- Addition of an optimized binary entity serialization.
- Added bulk header to email notifications.
- Improved handling of long URLs in emails.
Memory
- Centralized management of Hibernate Cache provision.
- Replacement of MemoryService cache with ehcache in preparation for cluster wide cache optimizations.
- Upgrade to ecache 1.3 to enable JMX capabilities.
Portal
- Addition of site categorization.
- Addition of tool categorization.
- Improved experimental iFrame-less tool presentation (a.k.a. PDA portal)
User Directory Service
- Improved performance when retrieving provided users.
- Support for login IDs (for Kerberos authentication, for example) which differ from user EIDs.
- Optional short-term authentication caching to greatly improve DAV performance.
- Can now enable or disable User Directory Provider implementations via the sakai.properties file.
- Reduced number of required methods in the User Directory Provider interface.
Provisional Tools
Blogger
- Internationalization improvements.
- Switch to using same WYSIWYG editor as other tools in Sakai (FCK editor).
Data Warehouse
- Separated from OSP to realize its general usefulness for reporting functionality.
Linktool
- Updated documentation.
- Now deploy SakaiSigning.jws to webservices by default.
- Added placement id to list of parameters passed.
- Support for specifying additional parameters in the tool setup or URL.
- Cleaned up tool formatting and validation.
- Added new default verification script.
Page Order Helper
- Improved keyboard accessibility.
Podcasts
- Permissions now a reflection of permissions in Resources.
Polls
- Minor UI improvements:
- rich text editor
- date picker widget
- Improved data validation.
Reset Password
- Added to release as a Provisional tool.
Search
- Addressed critical indexing errors for clusters with a journaled indexer.
- Reduced memory usage in indexers.
Jira Details
There are a number of pre-configured filters in Jira, which provide an entry point for information on Sakai 2.5: