schooltoolers team mailing list archive

[Tom Hoffman <tom.hoffman@xxxxxxxxx>]

On behalf of our team I'm happy to announce the release of SchoolTool 2.4
for Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring).  It is also available through our dev PPA for
12.04 LTS and 12.10.

This is not a big feature release, but more a snapshot of ongoing
refinement and fixes.

Reports and report infrastructure are a major theme.  We're in the process
of updating the reports to a new style guide in line with the design of the
web interface.  Some are updated in the new release; some are still in
progress.

We added some infrastructure to allow us to quickly make pdf versions of
tables from the web interface using the same underlying code, which speeds
up report development.

We have also been getting lots of feedback from a growing global user base
and have focused on quickly fixing and releasing small bugs and feature
requests, adding up to many small improvements over the past six months
throughout the application.

In the coming weeks, we will release a beta version of SchoolTool including
a new task scheduling infrastructure for performing long running tasks like
report generation and data imports asynchronously.  That is, when you
request a long running report, for example, the server will work on it in
the background while you continue to interact with the web interface.  It
is a lot of new moving parts, so we will be testing it throughout the
coming months to make sure it will run on your servers as well as it does
on ours.

New features

* New design of PDF reports
* Ability to render forms and tables to PDF
* Average, total and category weights in report sheets
* Enter scores in gradebook cells of comment activities
* Section roster, person profile, and resources reports
* Three new reports for CanDo

Full release notes: http://book.schooltool.org/2.4-release-notes.html

Thanks to Gediminas, Justas, Douglas, all our users who contributed
feedback and ideas, and to Mark Shuttleworth for his support!

--Tom