by Sander Bangma.  

Hi All,

As announced a little while ago on the roadmap we are planning to focus on some bigger pieces of UX improvements for Moodle 4.0. To enable us to do so we are going to take a bit longer and the
scheduled release date for Moodle 4.0 is November 2021.

This idea to focus on UX was met with general enthusiasm and I look forward to seeing what we can do together to deliver some significant steps forward in terms of Moodle’s usability! Please have a look at our UX Community to
see what research we are currently doing.

At the same time it also raised the question of how the community can provide contributions back to Moodle in the meantime. With the release of Moodle 3.9 behind us we’ve been able to consider this in some more detail and have decided to still go ahead
with major releases at the usual November 2020 and May 2021 timeframes. 

What does this look like?

Moodle 3.10 and 3.11

Over the next 12 -18 months the majority of HQ developers will be focused on the UX improvements that are scheduled for Moodle 4.0. This means that the Moodle 3.10 and 3.11 releases are anticipated to contain mostly community contributed improvements
and a couple smaller HQ developments. 

Note that while we will endeavour to include all community contributions in the 3.10 and 3.11 releases, we may defer some improvements to a later release depending on the complexity, size, and impact on other scheduled work.

Release support timeframes

Moodle 3.9 is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, which means that it will have full support for 12 months and support for any security issues for an additional 24 months. The normal support timeframes will apply for the 3.10 and 3.11 releases; full support
for 12 months and security support for an additional 6 months.

Moodle 4.0 will adhere to the same normal support timeframes, with Moodle 4.1 scheduled to be the next LTS version.

Developer information

From a development perspective this means that we will be maintaining the regular main development branch for Moodle 4.0 for the larger UX improvements, as well as a separate branch for Moodle 3.10 (and later 3.11) for the community contributions.

If you are interested in knowing more details about the changes to our branches, repositories and tools, please follow this epic in tracker. We are also reviewing our code deprecation policy and
would welcome your feedback there too.