The 44th ILIAS Development Conference gave the international ILIAS community it's first opportunity to gather together for a major event in the venerable university town of Marburg. Almost 90 members of the community met on the 10th and 11th of September 2025 to find out about the latest ILIAS development trends. The conference got off to a dignified start, being opened by the vice president of the university, Prof. Dr. Yvonne Zimmermann, followed by the awarding of the ILIAS Community Award 2025 to Fabian Schmid.

Member of the Technical Board Rob Falkenstein and ILIAS product manager Matthias Kunkel provided an overview of the current state of development of ILIAS 11. The programming for this newest ILIAS version will be finished by the end of October. With this in mind, the ILIAS testing manager, Fabian Kruse, mentally prepared those present for the upcoming testing of ILIAS 11. Together with Hansjörg Lauener (Uni Bern), Fabian also showed interested ILIAS users how to write good bug reports, for only when armed with the correct information is it possible for developers to fix problems promptly.

One of the topics of the DevConf was the user interface and improvements to the user interface. Ferdinand Engländer (CaT Concepts and Training GmbH) presented a concept for the fundamental overhaul of the tab navigation. One goal of his is to noticeably reduce the number of tabs and subtabs. but also for a semantically clear use of tab navigation as opposed to buttons and action drop-downs. Giulia Faraone and Vincenzo Padula from the service provider OC Group presented an  accessible user interface. Their version of ILIAS is attractive and fulfils the requirements of the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines).

There were also presentations on the improvements that will be seen in the upcoming ILIAS 11. Oliver Samoila (Databay AG) presented the changes and improvements to the Data Collection, Ilias Spirou (Leifos GmbH) the improvements to the Poll Object. Alexandra Tödt (Leifos GmbH) reported on the upcoming changes to the search function. On the one hand, the search function will be converted to new UI elements from Kitchen Sink in ILIAS 11. On the other hand, the advanced search function will be removed. The same fate also threatens the user search function if no funding can be found for its conversion.

The increasingly discussed topic of plugins was addressed by Tomke Fries (Uni Hannover), who presented the revised data collection for plugins, which has been enriched with much additional information. With this, the ILIAS Society would like to ensure that plugins are available early for new ILIAS versions and that community members agree to finance plugin updates at an early stage.

The Test and Assessment developer, Stephan Kergomard, gave us a first peek at ILIAS 12. Financed by OSDN funds[1], Kergomard will completely re-work how questions are created and place the process on technologically up-to-date foundations. To the relief of many of those present, it was made clear that existing questions will continue to function, but can also be migrated. The new process for creating questions will also allow multiple questions on one page.

All contributions in the lecture hall were recorded by our colleagues from the University of Marburg and will soon be available on ILIAS's You Tube channel. The slides for most of the presentations are available on the Marburger DevConf Wiki.

The 45th ILIAS Development Conference will take place on 19th March 2026 at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences of North Rhine-Westphalia in Cologne.