What's New
Overview
This document gives you an overview of BigBlueButton 2.6, the latest version of BigBlueButton now in development.
Note: This document is DRAFT and will be expanded upon as 2.6 development goes through alpha, beta, and release.
BigBlueButton 2.6 offers users improved usability, increased engagement, and more performance.
- Usability - making common functions (such as raise hand) easier
- Engagement - giving the instructor more ways to engage students
- Performance - increasing overall performance and scalability
Here’s a breakdown of what’s new in 2.6.
Usability
Dark theme
BigBlueButton supports dark theme. To enable it just navigate to the Settings.
Improved Echo Test dialog
Improved notification of recording start
The indicator for whether the recording is on has been made bigger. Additionally if you create your meeting with an optional parameter notifyRecordingIsOn=true
, you users will see the following dialog when the recording commenses and also when joining a session that is already actively being recorded. You can choose to either continue or leave the session.
Allow pinning of more than one webcam
Upload your own webcam background
Improved layouts manager selection
Live Automatic Closed Captions
Downloading presentation with whiteboard annotations included
Upload a presentation straight from NextCloud
Recording in MP4 format
Engagement
Fully reimplemented whiteboard (tl;draw)
Exporting Shared notes to the whiteboard
Exporting breakout rooms’ shared notes as a presentation to the main room
Exporting breakout rooms’ whiteboard annotations to the main room
Easier setup of polling (when prepared in advance)
Analytics
Performance
Recording API improvements
Allows for quicker, more efficient search and retrieval of recording data.
Experimental
Upgraded components
For full details on what is new in BigBlueButton 2.6, see the release notes. Recent releases:
Other notable changes
We have retired the bbb-demo
API Demos development only package
We recommend using API MATE or Greenlight - see the development setup section for more information.
Development
For information on developing in BigBlueButton, see setting up a development environment for 2.6.
The build scripts for packaging 2.6 (using fpm) are located in the GitHub repository here.
Contribution
We welcome contributors to BigBlueButton 2.6! The best ways to contribute at the current time are:
-
Help localize BigBlueButton 2.6 on Transifex project for BBB 2.6
- Try out installing BigBlueButton 2.6 and see if you spot any issues.
- Help test a 2.6 pull request in your development environment.