Mahara

Hi Dan,

a way to lock field editing is in the site admin pages /admin/users/institutions.php.

If your studensts login in via moodle you can lock the desired fields. I think at the moment there is no way to prevent group creation. Nigel will give you tips how to modifiy php code.

It would be great if you publish you blocktype code in the "plugin dev" group (http://mahara.org/group/view.php?id=37)

Greetings from the black forest

Heinz

Hello Dan,

 I had a similar problem working with Moodle. I had to protect a block as students were displaying silly things on screen and the instituition management started to become concerned about it.

It is very sad that we have to ban options from Mahara, since the holistic conception of  "eportfolio" is precisely the oposite: empowering learners to have their own learning space. However, you also need to cover all the possible risks (legally speaking) for the institution you work.

This is the advice I can give you, from my experience as a "censor" of Moodle:

 The php files that manage with groups in Mahara, are mygroups.php -to display groups- and create.php -to create new ones- in the group folder.

The first thing I would do is to check the role of the user accessing both files. This is my code for doing so in  Moodle:

require_once("../../config.php");
require_login();

global $USER;
$adminContext = get_context_instance(CONTEXT_SYSTEM, SITEID);
if(!user_has_role_assignment($USER->id,1,$adminContext->id)){

redirect("block.php");

    exit();
}

where 1 is, as you know, the role of the administrator in Moodle.

 I have also used the has_capability option in Moodle to preven students from filling some fields in Moodle:

i.e.

 if (has_capability('block/ilp:view',$usercontext)) {

    $allow_tutor = 1;
    }
    if (!($allow_tutor)) {
        error("insufficient access");
    }

etc, 

Mahara allows to set up the following roles

1) Plain user

2)  Site Staff

3) Site Admin

These are global roles.For each institution defined in your site, additionaly, you can have instituiton staff.

I would grant the teachers the role of site staff/institution staff, and  I would protect the code of create.php and mygroups.pho with something similar like the former code.

Unfortunatelly, I still don't know all the functions in Mahara that can help you to check the user's role. Perphaps Nigel will be able to help here, as he is the main developer.

If I am not wrong, in the Mahara user table, you can use the fields "staff" and "admin" to check i the user has any of these roles. 

Hope that this information is useful.

Regards

Aaricia/Mari

Hi - see my reply to Aaricia's post about the technical details.

I can see here you have a good use case for limiting who can create groups. There is a feature request for this on the tracker already, it might be worth us looking at implementing it.