Hello all Moodlers,

It's my pleasure to put this cherry on the top of the collective cake that is Moodle 2.5, and to announce that it is now ready for you to use! (Download a package or use Git)

This is the first release under the newMay/November release schedule, so we had one less month than usual.  Still we collectively managed to close an impressive record 705 issues in that time, and we had code contributions from 112 developers, the most ever in a single major release.  This release has also been the most-tested in history.  I wish we were all in one room so we could create some applause but instead you might like to message some of your favourite contributors with a personal thank you.

For a more user-friendly tour of the highlights see our New Features page.  Full technical details and credits are on theMoodle 2.5 release notes.

There are three major features in 2.5 I'd particularly like to highlight here:

1. Badges: Moodle is (I think!) the first LMS to support badges!  Moodle teachers and admins can now design and award their own badges for any users on their sites, using their own criteria.  These badges are compatible with theOpen Badgesstandard from Mozilla, and can be used outside Moodle as well. I think this is a really great standard that will allow educators to experiment with a wide variety of techniques for certification and motivation.
   
   
2. Bootstrap:  Moodle now includes a new Bootstrap base theme, and we have begun the migration towards using this framework for all our themes.  Bootstrapis rapidly becoming the defacto framework for responsive design around the web, so I'm sure this will make a lot of theme designers (and users!) very happy. Moodle itself still needs further improvements to fully take advantage of this framework, and this is a very high priority for our core developers in 2.6.  Our aim is to make Moodle look and perform equally well on every device, for every theme.   We still support older themes and will continueto for some time, but if you are updating your theme or making a new one, then we highly encourage you to use the new Bootstrap framework.
   
   
3. Usability:  Moodle 2.5 contains a lot of other smaller usability and accessibility improvements, from simplified forms to more navigable course pages.  This continues our incremental usability improvement made in every version, and is difficult but very important work that we will continue to focus on in every release. 

In addition, we also released updates for our stable branches:2.4.4, 2.3.7 and 2.2.10.

I hope you enjoy all the new releases and that they are helping you improve the quality of education wherever you are. Thank you for your support and for being part of the Moodle community.

Moodle on!
Martin