02 April 2026, 20:31

Hello everyone,

Our team is taking a short Easter break, but before we head off, we wanted to share some exciting news: The preview version of Mahara 26.04 is here!

Months of work are now ready for you to download. Some of you may have already been exploring the changes on your own test or development servers. Now we are also making a download package available for those who don't work with Git.

What is new?

A whole lot! The biggest project by far for this release is the interface refresh. Our team, led by Doris Tam on the technical side and Evonne Cheung on the graphic design / front-end side of things,went through virtually every page template, every CSS rule, and a good chunk of the PHP code. It was like tailoring loved, ripped, and well worn jeans into smart dress pants that work for far more occasions than jeans.

But that's not all. We've made a range of improvements to support the portfolio creation process, help administrators, and include some more technical updates under the hood. Please note: Links are accessible for subscriber representatives with access to our issue and enhancement tracker.

Usability:

• Merge all journal sections into one
• Merge 'Text' and 'Note' sections
• Allow submissions of group portfolios
• Record audio & video from within a section (experimental implementation as not supported by all browsers)
• Withdraw invitation to a group
• Add a 'Back to top' button
• Add 'Entries per page' option to CPD section
• Use different format to represent decimal hours in CPD
• Add preferred section options to portfolio edit screen
• Make 'Assessment' section instructions visible on the portfolio page
• Rename 'block' to 'section' on the front-end
• Upgrade TinyMCE from 5.x to 7.x and add accordion block support to the editor

Administration:

• SmartEvidence: Editing of active frameworks
• Enable SmartEvidence administration for institution admin
• Merge one account into another
• Separate the configuration 'Allow public portfolios' from 'Allow the use of secret URLs'
• Set default section width in config.php
• Use sync_langpacks.php while site is closed
• CLI auth_method_change script add option to allow setting of default remote username as username
• Create institution web service to fetch disk/database usage
• Adding new custom options to OIDC auth plugin
• Make SAML login available when site is closed for maintenance
• Allow adding a maintenance message when closing site via CLI

Technical:

• Artefact chooser enhancements to enable multiple elements in a form
• WCAG 2.2+ compliance improvements for 26.04

These features will soon be documented in the Mahara manual for Mahara 26.04.

Accessing the code

Subscriber representatives have two options to access the code:

• via the Git repository for compiling on their own environment. Make sure you select the branch 26.04_DEV.
• via the download page for the release candidate where the theme and third-party libraries are precompiled.

If you'd like to try the Mahara 26.04 preview out, follow the upgrade instructions to upgrade your non-production sites. Since this is a preview release, we don't recommend running it live as there can still be some changes. We would love for you to put Mahara 26.04 through its paces on a non-production site and let us know if you spot anything that needs fixing before the final release.

Found a bug?

If you come across any bugs, please report them by 20 April if you can. We will then review them and decide what can be addressed before the release of Mahara 26.04.0 by the end of April 2026 and what will carry over to a later release.

You can view a list of all the issues and new features going into Mahara 26.04, and if you can't install it yourself, our developer instance lets you explore the new features that don't require site administrator access.

To walk you through the new features, we have scheduled four sessions across different time zones. Pick the one that works best for you.

Mahara Easter egg

The refresh project has been a very long one with lots of tedious changes. So what do you do so it's not all just work? Evonne and Doris hid an Easter egg! Happy hunting. If you find it, send me a mail, and you'll get a surprise.

We can't wait to hear what you think about Mahara 26.04!

Thank you
Kristina
on behalf of the Mahara 26.04 Release Managers at Catalyst