Engage students with easily embedded apps for online courses. Supercharge your course with compelling experiences and game mechanics.
v10.1.0 includes several significant quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes, and optimizations to the platform in the wake of the v10.0.0 update.
basic_author to student. The instance owner is now identified in the collaboration dialog, and additional checks and fixes have been implemented associated with student users. (#1540)basic_author role. (#1540, #1541)access.log spam from phpfpm. (#1548)Materia-Widget-Dependencies package manifest (#1539)Full Changelog: https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia/compare/v10.0.1...v10.1.0
This is a minor maintenance release to address several small issues identified after the major 10.0.0 update.
materia-widget-dependencies packageFull Changelog: https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia/compare/v10.0.0...v10.0.1
Materia version 10 is the single largest update to the platform to date, representing a colossal amount of effort from current and former developers at UCF's Center for Distributed Learning. Its primary goal is to address considerable technical debt due to the system's age, incorporate long-requested and desired features such as a support user dashboard and improved accessibility communication, and enhance the system's overall look and feel.
Previously, static assets (JS & CSS) were part of a separate repository, Materia-Server-Client-Assets. This update brings these assets back into the fold in a new top-level src directory. Compiled assets are emitted by webpack into public/ (public/dist/ when in development environments). Because React is doing the heavy lifting of DOM rendering, the old PHP partial views in fuel/app/themes/default/ are retired.
This conversion also affects how theme overrides work. Previously, controllers would listen for Events registered in Fuel package's bootstrap.php files, and make use of PHP partial views provided by those packages. While the event registration/trigger system remains, theme packages operate a little differently. See the Materia-Theme-UCF repo for more info.
The React conversion gave us the opportunity to give Materia a much-needed facelift. Enjoy crisper, snappier interfaces, improved UX like creator guide links in the widget creator, responsive layouts, and a soon-to-be-implemented Dark Mode.
We've added a new user role, support_user, to bridge the gap between normal users and administrators. Both support users and admins have access to new admin panels to handle common requests from users. Support users are given access to the User admin interface, where they can easily look up user information, play history, and owned instances - and even administrate those instances directly. They also have access to the Instance admin interface, which allows fast lookups of any instance in the database and administrative actions like modifying settings or adding users.
The Widget Admin interface remains available for super users, allowing for fast widget installation in addition to updates and administration of the widget catalog.
The widget catalog and details pages now include additional qualifying information about keyboard and screen reader accessibility if the requisite metadata is included in a widget's install.yaml:
metadata:
accessibility_keyboard: Full # values can be Full | Limited | None
accessibility_reader: Full
accessibility_description: >
A brief description of the widget's accessibility implementation. This metadata value is optional.
Because of MSCA's retirement, the widget development kit will need a new node package dependency to provide the required Materia JS and CSS to properly run. This is provided in the new materia-widget-dependencies package, which is located within a package.json in the public/dist directory. The package can be published via a GitHub action as required, to include the latest and greatest changes from the Materia engine, creator, and score cores, or other aspects of the creator and player.
Other notable features include:
img property to widget instance objects used by the LTI widget picker. by @FrenjaminBanklin in https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia/pull/1496
Note: this list of pull requests is not comprehensive!*
The following developers and contributors were instrumental in this release, and we're grateful for all of their hard work:
Full Changelog: https://github.com/ucfopen/Materia/compare/v9.0.3...v10.0.0