Release notes for WeBWorK 2.8

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

Cautions

Warning :

Because new tables and fields have been added to the OpenProblemLibrary and for new MathAchievement features upgrading from stable webwork (WW-2.7) will require:

• Upgrading the tables by visiting the admin page. (The main change will be to add the field "description" to the set and user_set tables.)
• Updating the library collection webwork-open-problem-library
• Running webwork2/bin/OPL-update to update the library tables.

• To use these instructions your server will require at least perl version 5.10.x (5.12.x would be better, 5.18 is the current version) to run weBWorK release/2.7. Type perl --version on the command line of your server to check.

What's new?

At the moment this is in no particular order.

• level search capability added to LibraryBrowser
• Add requirement for JSON.pm (for sage)
• Add requirement for HTML::Scrubber (to for anti XSS fixes)
• OPL is now default library for sure
• Remove old methods of displaying math
  • Should ascii math be retained?
  • Should LatexMathML be retained?
  • Should jsMath be retained?
• WEBWORK_DIRECTORY is insured to be defined in WeBWorK::Constants.
• numOfAttempts should now give the expected results in homework sets. (Gatewayquizzes need more testing.)
• OPL-update improvements
  • OPL taxonomy also stored in json file.
• Datepicker (calendars) in Homeworksets1 & 2
• Math4 theme updates. (Goehle and Hsu)
• More like this tag in OPL
• js directory reorganization
  • this should be reviewed for more tweaking
• MathAchievement upgrades -- "potions" -- allow for perks for doing well on homework.
  • (requires database upgrade?)
  • Add tabs to Achievement editor.
• MathJax configured to provide better accessibility. Configured now only defaults.config.
• Cosign.pm -- fix typos
• Fixed glitch in Statistics graph
• Massive amount of tweaks to make the basic WeBWorK CMS interface validate to W3 standards. Problems will usually not validate, mainly because of the use of $PAR which is not a container.
• Tweaks to update course page -- slightly less scary error messages. -- adding harmless: in front of the message helps but we should change the color on these.
• Instructors can choose to show paths on hardcopy.
• Chinese and Korean translations added.
• Add homework set descriptions as well as file names -- helps keep file names short. (requires database upgrade?)

What could possibly go wrong?

• There are warning messages at the bottom of the page labeled Harmless: .... .
  • These indicate that many older courses have an extra field named published. This field was replaced by the field "visible" and has not been used for some time. In a future version of WeBWorK this field will be automatically removed, but we leave it in place for the moment for those rare cases where there is important data in the field. The extra field does no harm and the warning messages simply alert you that the unused field is still there.
• There are a series of warning messages that $displayMode is undefined.
  • This is most likely because you were using one of the display modes for showing equations that is now deprecated (e.g. jsMath). Click on the radio buttons in the lower left of the page to switch to MathJax or images mode. Also reset the default choice for displayMode in localOverrides.conf. You may also need to reset the default courses for individual courses on the Course Configuration page.
• There is a warning message that your modelCourse is not up to date
  • Unless you have a heavily modified modelCourse that you use to build new courses it is often best to link to the directory webwork2/courses.dist/modelCourse. If you do this then system updates in the material used when building a new course (for example a collection of achievements or the achievement images) will be automatically made available to new courses on your site.
  • The alternative is to manually check, each time there is an upgrade, whether there is new material in the webwork2/course.dist/modelCourse directory that you want to include in your courses/modelCourse directory.
  • Construct the link using

  cd webwork/courses
  sudo mv modelCourses modelCourses.old
  sudo ln -s ../webwork2/courses.dist/modelCourse modelCourse