by Nathan Wallach – Thursday, 8 August 2019, 4:05 AM.

The release team is working on finalizing the release of WW 2.15.

The preliminary code is in the WeBWorK 2.15 branch (there is also a 2.15 branch of PG). See: https://github.com/openwebwork/webwork2/pull/948
There are still some “small” changes planned, but the core features are all essentially frozen, except for some remaining PRs under review to polish things off.
The big changes are:

1. UTF-8 / internationalization support (several production sites have been using the current code or earlier versions already),
2. Support for use of MathQuill as an alternative to MathView and WirisEditor as a math input and preview tool.

People are invited to test out WW 2.15 using Docker or a non-production server and to contribute to the pre-release testing in the coming few weeks.

• Testers should pay attention to the setting of $ENABLE_UTF8MB4 in site.conf (see site.conf.dist).
• We recommend it be set to 1 (on) unless you are testing outside Docker on a system with an old mysql which does not support utf8mb4.
• Testing on a system with existing course database tables will require upgrading the tables (admin tables with the bin/upgrade_admin_db.pl script and courses using the admin interface).

Users of foreign languages are encouraged to help create a hard-copy theme for their language with the appropriate LaTeX headers for their language using either pdflatex + babel and/or xelatex + polyglossia. (Including a note about fonts needed and how to install them, both in the hard-copy theme file and in the pull request would be helpful.)
Moving a production site to WW 2.15 will require database table updates, and more “small” DB changes are under consideration to head off that requirement for WW 2.16, if possible. So, upgrading production sites before the formal release may require upgrading your tables again. Patience is recommended for production servers, especially on a server with many courses.