![\"numbas](\"http:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/numbas-v2-homepage.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWe’ve added some\u00a0very helpful new features, and changed the way the\u00a0database is organised to make working in groups much easier. All\u00a0exams and questions in the editor database\u00a0are now\u00a0organised into\u00a0projects<\/em>, which provide a simple way of collecting together material relating to a particular course or activity in one place.<\/p>\n Projects allow you to automatically grant editing rights to a group of collaborators, keep track of changes that have been made to your content, and\u00a0filter out irrelevant material. Project-level comments make it easier to coordinate writing, testing, and deployment of questions and exams with your team members.<\/p>\n We’ve rebuilt\u00a0the editing interface from the ground up, to make\u00a0it\u00a0cleaner and easier to use.<\/p>\n Activity feeds on individual items, projects, and for the site as a whole let you see at a glance what’s going on, and quickly find items you’ve been working on.<\/p>\n To make it easier to find content which is appropriate for the level you’re teaching, we’ve added new “topic” and “ability level” fields to both exams and questions. Using these, you can say what subjects your items\u00a0relate to, and what stage of education they’re appropriate for. Over the years, we’ve had many new users ask questions like, “do you have anything for first-year engineering students?” With these new tags, answering that question is a lot easier.<\/p>\n We need help!\u00a0<\/strong>I’ve\u00a0set up tags for the contexts we deal with – largely, pure maths and stats in the English system. We need information about other subjects and education systems.\u00a0Please email us<\/a> with\u00a0any categories you’d like to\u00a0be made available.<\/p>\n Finally, a long-standing problem with the public Numbas editor hosted at mathcentre.ac.uk is the mass of unfinished questions (and copies of questions) that clog up search results. We’re hoping to reduce this problem by introducing a “published” state for exams and questions. When you create a new item, by default it’s only visible to you. When\u00a0you’re ready to share it with the community, you must\u00a0click the “Publish” button, making it visible to everyone. A handy checklist helps you to make sure you’ve set up your metadata – description, tags, copyright statement, and so on – before\u00a0making something visible to the public.<\/p>\n Items which were visible to the\u00a0public and tagged as “ready to use” before the database was upgraded have automatically been\u00a0marked as published.<\/p>\n All existing content needs to be sorted\u00a0into projects and\/or published, in order to take advantage of the new features. To make that task easier, I’ve written a migration tool<\/a> which lets you sort your material in bulk.\u00a0If you’ve written material on the public editor, please take a moment to sort through your content – it shouldn’t take long.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n