13 June 2011, 23:57

After 9 months of development and bug fixing, we are proud to announce the final release of Mahara 1.4:

https://launchpad.net/mahara/1.4/1.4.0

While this release has focussed on bug fixing and increasing the stability and security of this Open Source social e-portfolio platform, it also includes the following new features:

• new Google Apps and Image Gallery blocks
• star ratings with comments
• easier page for sharing content with others
• ability to add comments on file artefacts
• support for SSL-based SMTP and LDAP servers
• administration interace for mail server configuration
• remote avatar (Gravatar) support for HTTPS sites

Other notable changes and bug fixes include:

• "views" are now "pages" and "blogs" are now "journals"
• lots of small changes to make the interface more consistent
• pages can now display more than one embedded video at a time
• added a fullscreen button to the internal video player
• added spellchecker and undo button to the WYSIWYG editor
• spam checks now also performed on forum posts
• support for new Youtube Iframe embed code
• optional site-wide maximum quota
• working start/stop overrides on pages
• removal of the obsolete and broken Solr search plugin
• removal of the httpswwwroot setting
• removal of the .htaccess file

See the full list of bug fixes (more than 200!) here:

https://launchpad.net/mahara/+milestone/1.4.0

How to install / upgrade

You can find instructions on how to install a new Mahara site or upgrade an existing one on our wiki:

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator's_Guide/Installing_Mahara
https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator's_Guide/Upgrading_Mahara

If you are looking for translations, have a look at this page:

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Language_Packs

End of security support for Mahara 1.2

As per our security policy, we only offer security support for the last two major releases of Mahara (1.3 and 1.4).

If you are running a 1.2 installation, make sure you upgrade to 1.4 now. On the other hand, if you are running 1.3, then you have until 1.5 is released to upgrade.

All site administrators running a supported version of Mahara are encouraged to subscribe to our security announcements:

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/view.php?id=43

Support and bugs

If you find any bugs in this new release, please feel free to use our bug tracker to report them:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug

And if you need help with anything, the support forum is the best place to ask your questions:

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/view.php?id=2

Credits

We would like to thank the following organisations for funding the features and bug fixes that have gone into Mahara 1.4:

• Catalyst IT
• Lancaster University Network Services
• New Zealand Ministry of Education
• Rocky View Schools

and highlight all of the people who have contributed code to this release:

as well as the organisations they work for:

and finally the most complete translations at the time of writing:

• French (maintainers: Dominique-Alain Jan and Nicolas Martignoni)
• German (maintainer: Heinz Krettek)
• Japanese (maintainer: Mitsuhiro Yoshida)