Release notes for WeBWorK 2.16

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

New WeBWorK Features

• A new manual problem grader that works for all problems in homework and in gateway quizzes.
• The ability to navigate between students when acting as a student

• Upgrades to the way images are shown to students (resize, zoom, drag)
• Upgraded to MathJax 3 from MathJax 2
• As of 2.15 WeBWorK supports MathQuill for student input.
• ADD_JS_FILE and ADD_CSS_FILE in the PG.pl macro.
• Explanation essays (ask for a regular answer, separately ask for an explanation essay, but the essay part can be globally disabled)
• Rearrange presentation order for homework and quizzes on Homework Sets page (see PR #1282)
• Achievements items need not be single-use

New PG Features

• TikZ images in problems.
• New macro parserGraphTool.pl for interactive graphing problems. See also GraphTool problem technique.
• "digits" tolType (needs explanation wherever tolerance in general is explained, TODO)
• random_coprime and random_pairwise_coprime methods added to PGauxiliaryFunctions.pl (Needs documentation probably in [1].
• PGML can be used in set header files
• MathObject: context classes can have aliases and alternates. (For example variable "X" could be an alias for "x".)
• Improved hardcopy of PGML problems
• Improvements in efficiency to PGstatisticsmacros.pl.

Security/Advanced Features

• Revised "WeBWorK errors" page code + error.log records
• Fixes to the LTI integration, and improved debugging
• Same-site Cookies
• Fix applets in gateway quizzes
• Additional security fixes

Things that were fixed

Should there be a section like this? For example:

• Fixed bug when Gateway questions were not in sequential order
• Fix bug where, for example, `Formula("-5/(-2 x)")` would display `5/2x` for its text string

Upgrade Instructions

• Many third party javascript libraries (jquery, jquery-ui, mathjax, codemirror, etc.) are no longer packaged with WeBWorK. These libraries are now installed via npm:

1. Install npm from your package manager (Ubuntu: apt install npm CentOS/RHEL: yum install npm).
2. Use npm to install third party javascript:

  > cd /opt/webwork/webwork2/htdocs
  > npm install

• WW 2.16 requires MathJax v3. Previous versions of WW required MathJax v2 that was installed at /opt/webwork/MathJax. WW 2.16 installs MathJax via npm, so if you are upgrading an existing WW installation you may safely delete /opt/webwork/MathJax.
• The following perl packages will need to be installed
  • HTTP::Async (on Ubuntu install the package libhttp-async-perl)
  • CGI::Cookie (see https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/pull/1149)
  • Archive::Zip (on Ubuntu install the package libarchive-zip-perl)
• There have been some tweaks to localOverrides.conf.dist. If you have not done any customization to localOverrides.conf then you should consider replacing it with a new copy of localOverrides.conf.dist. If you have made customizations in localOverrides.conf, you should consider synchronizing them with the latest version of localOverrides.conf.dist.
• Update your modelcourse with the new modelcourse.dist
• The math4 theme has changed. If you use a custom theme, you may need to update your theme files to address these changes.
• WeBWorK is currently not compatible with recent versions of the SQL::Abstract package, so avoid upgrading past version 1.8. WW is known to work with versions up to 1.87. (See: https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/issues/1236 and https://webwork.maa.org/moodle/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=5570)
• If you want to allow the use of the new PGtikz.pl macro, you will need to install imagemagick (Ubuntu: apt install imagemagick) and modify /etc/ImageMagick-6/policy.xml and change the line near the end of the file from

  <policy domain="coder" rights="none" pattern="PDF" />

to

  <policy domain="coder" rights="read" pattern="PDF" />

• TikZ has two different options for a back-end program for generating images. The system administrator will have to decide which one is appropriate for their system (see https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/pull/1320)
• TikZ requires the following two commands to be installed on your system: dvisvgm and pdf2svg (Ubuntu: apt install dvisvgm pdf2svg; RHEL/CentOS: yum install dvisvgm - pdf2svg is not currently packaged for REHEL/CentOS.)
• UTF-8 support of the XML subsystem needs a local patch to be applied to /usr/share/perl5/XMLRPC/Lite.pm See: https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/issues/967#issuecomment-523941959. This patch can be applied with

 sudo patch -p1 -d / < /opt/webwork/webwork2/docker-config/xmlrpc-lite-utf8-fix.patch

Call for Translators

Some text has changed in the WeBWorK interface, so there are new entries that need to be translated into other languages.