Release notes for WeBWorK 2.5.0

This article is under construction. Use the information herein with caution until this message is removed.

                                     WeBWorK                                    
                         Online Homework Delivery System                        
                                  Version 2.5.0                                

                    Copyright 2000-2011, The WeBWorK Project                    
                              All rights reserved.                              

Details
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Release date: ??
SVN tag: rel-2-5-0 
SVN url/branch:  expected address--- http://svn.webwork.maa.org/system/trunk  module
Modules:    webwork2   pg

 IMPORTANT!! Be sure to inspect changes in the configuration files when upgrading to this release.

 VERY IMPORTANT!!  Transfer changes from database.conf.dist to your database.conf file.  
     In particular there are changes in the schema for "depths", "set", "set_user".
     In most cases you can simply copy the new database.conf.dist file to your database.conf file (unless you have made local changes, which is rare).
     Without these changes you will get errors regarding "visible" and "published" for older courses and can add extraneous fields to your course database.

 ALWAYS check the error log  (often at)   webwork/webwork2/logs/error_log   when something goes wrong
       --- there may be extra error information there. An alternate location is /var/log/apache/error_log

Latest News

• April 6, 2011 -- as of a few days ago the "trunk" version at http://svn.webwork.maa.org/system/trunk/webwork2 coincides with the release described here. It is a stable release and is currently being used on tested.webwork.maa.org to host courses. However there are still features that will be added or tweaked before we "tag" this release and as always there may be subtle bugs that aren't immediately apparent.

New features 2.5.0

• The new Library Browser 2 with drag and drop capabilities -- try it out -- will still need some graphic design tweaks.
• When creating a new homework set it is automatically assigned to the instructor creating it. You are no longer asked for permission. This prevents other extraneous errors that would sometimes occur later if the set is viewed before being assigned to someone.
• Correct and incorrect answers are now color coded!

Under the hood

• The names "published" and "unpublished" have been changed to "visible" and "hidden" throughout the code. Having the terms in the application code different than those presented to the user was eventually going to cause trouble (when the original programmers moved on :-) )
• Removed some causes of the "non-numeric compare" error in GatewayQuiz.pm
• Error message for DateTime errors made slightly more user friendly.

Potential Gotchya's

• The RFT5746 warning message -- not all servers are up to date with a patch that fixes this exploit. Some of the newer browsers display this message. I've been mislead into thinking that it was the cause of a more serious browser hang problem when in fact the message is only a warning. It is a security error so the maintainer of the apache server should install patches to fix it.
• After updating go to the admin page and update at least one course. This insures that the "depths" table and the "locations_address" table are created properly.
• If your browser hangs or seems to be behaving in a funny way you may need to do "shift reload" on your browser a few times to get rid of cached javaScripts which are causing trouble.
• If your browser hangs try to see if it work in other browsers. For example while library browser 2 will work with the newest versions of FireFox 3 and the brand new Firefox 4 it will hang on older Firefox 3 browsers. It uses a structure called "formData" which the older browsers don't support. One tweak that will be needed is to make the library browser 2 fail more gracefully on these older browsers.