31 August 2010, 22:58

Hello,

Long awaited, the Release Candidate for Mahara 1.3 is out. Richard Mansfield put it online yesterday afternoon. We are very excited about the new version of Mahara as a number of cool new features have been developed over the last few months. But also existing features have been improved and bugs fixed.

You can find an extensive list of new features below.

What is next?
It would be awesome if as many of you as possible tested this release candidate and informed us about bugs. Please file bugs at https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug. Please report any bugs you come across.

At this stage, bugs that affect the functionality, design, security etc. of 1.3 will be addressed. No more features will be worked on for 1.3 and implemented to allow for a hopefully quick final release.

We are keen on doing the final release as quickly as possible, but need the community's support for that. Thus, if you can install 1.3RC and test it, please do so.

Where is the download?
https://launchpad.net/mahara/1.3/1.3.0rc1 (also includes full release notes)

An upgrade path will be provided from 1.3.0rc1 to 1.3.0.

Greetings from New Zealand
Richard
Francois
Dan
Kristina
(Release Managers and Project Maintainers)


So what is new / improved? Here is a list of the most important things:

User features

• User-configurable home page (Dashboard View)
• Simpler main navigation
• Basic Mahara information & help on home page
• View/artefact feedback enhancements:
  • can be enabled/disabled on each view
  • recent comments can be edited by the author
  • can be deleted by author, view owner, admin (triggers notification)
  • multiple file attachments
  • require agreement by author & owner before making private comments public
  • anonymous comments can be enabled/disabled at site level
  • import/export of feedback
  • feedback email notifications in html
  • feedback moderation (makes comments private by default until approved by the view owner)
  • fine-grained permissions (comments can be enabled/disabled for every access list item)
• Collections (sets of Views that are linked to one another)
• Plans (task lists)
• Users can change the theme for individual views
• Support for Gravatar profile icons
• Configurable number of items in external feed, blog blocks
• New block types:
  • notifications
  • recently modified views
  • recent forum posts
• More user-friendly notifications & help text
• Show entire thread when replying to personal messages
• External objects that have <embed> or <object> tags can be embedded into blog posts, text boxes or uploaded within an HTML file
• Locking of blogposts and files
  • When views are submitted, blogposts & files in it are marked as locked
  • Editing/deleting of locked artefacts not permitted until view is released
• Atom feeds for public blogs and forums
• new flash-based video player with support for .mp4 files (H.264)

Interplay with Moodle 2 (Moodle 2 has not yet been released)

• Moodle Repository plugin support (allows a user's Mahara files to be accessed from their Moodle account)
• Portfolio API to allow import of artefacts from Moodle over MNET.

Groups

• Configurable group home page (Group Homepage View)
• Improved ways to add/invite users to invite only and "course membership" groups:
  • from user search page
  • in bulk from group members page
• View submission from group page and from the view itself
• Group categories
  • Admins can define categories
  • Categories can be assigned during group creation and used in group searches
• Admin group management page
  • Allows group admins to be demoted/assigned
  • Allows groups to be deleted
• Changes to view access notifications
  • Groups can turn off new view access notifictions altogether
• View access to group only notified when the view owner also belongs to the group

Administrative features

• Bulk user import & export (experimental)
• broken CAPTCHAs were removed
• Anti-spam features on register, contact us, anonymous comments:
  • Tricks to make form-filling difficult for bots
  • Check urls in content against known spam blacklists
• Admin area improvements:
  • detailed site statistics & graphs for users, views & groups
  • link to latest Mahara release
  • show status of cron
  • group site options into sections
• Record number of page hits on views & display these to the owner
• Facility to disable email addresses after receiving multiple bounces.
• Footer links can be disabled/enabled
• Online users can be disabled
• Indenting of threads can be disabled per-forum
• Active user sessions revoked on suspension
• Full security review
  • All db queries checked
  • All templates checked and automatic escaping enabled
• New version of HTMLPurifier
  • Safe <embed> and <object> tags now allowed in user html content
• New user search options in admin area:
  • Make users always searchable by their real names
  • Make users always searchable by usernames
• Leap2a support updated to version 2010-07