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Check out Mahara 26.04

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Kristina Hoeppner's profile picture
Kristina Hoeppner
Posts: 5056

01 May 2026, 14:43

Kia ora,

It's finally here: Mahara 26.04 with the new look and feel that many have been anticipating. Our team has been implementing many suggestions, ideas, and workflow improvements that our usability research with community members and an extensive information architecture review has uncovered. We are stoked to be presenting Mahara 26.04 to you so you can give it a go yourselves.

The main focus of 26.04 is a fresh new look and feel. The result is a more consistent, modern experience that feels instantly familiar because it draws on design patterns you already know from other platforms.

Watch our short highlight video for what's included in this release. 

Besides the new look, highlights in Mahara 26.04 include:

  • Persistent collection navigation, including in 'Edit' mode
  • Adding of a page from within a collection
  • Quick access to main content types during editing
  • Consolidation of all 'Journal' sections
  • Consolidation of 'Text' and 'Note' sections
  • Editing of active SmartEvidence frameworks
  • Access for institution administrators to the SmartEvidence framework management
  • Merging of accounts
  • Group portfolio submissions via Moodle
  • Recording of audio and video in the visual editor
  • Separate configuration options for enabling public portfolios and secret URLs

The Mahara manual is in the process of being updated with these and other new features as well as changed functionality.

The code for Mahara 26.04 is available to subscribers in our repository, both in Git and as downloadable package.

Supported releases

Mahara 25.04 is still supported for security updates. Support for Mahara 25.04 will end in October 2026. Mahara 26.04 will receive updates until October 2027.

Support and bugs

If you find any issues in this new release, please feel free to use our tracker to report them.

If you need help with anything, the support forum is the best place to ask your questions.

Contributors

Several organisations contributed to the release of Mahara 26.04 through funding new features and bug fixes. We want to thank all of them (in alphabetical order):

We would also like to thank all subscribers who through their subscription contribute financially to the overall project, enabling our team to fix issues, maintain the project infrastructure, and also create new features from our roadmap.

We also wish to thank the people who contributed code changes to this release:

Contributor Change sets
Robert Lyon (Catalyst IT) 120
Doris Tam (Catalyst IT 50
Phil Sainty (Catalyst IT) 33
Yvonne Waterman (Catalyst IT) 27
Evonne Cheung (Catalyst IT) 11
Kristina Hoeppner (Catalyst IT) 7
Anupama Dharmajan (Catalyst IT) 4
Djarran Cotleanu (Catalyst IT) 4
Richard Aljaste (Tartu Ülikool) 2
Sarah Cotton (Catalyst IT) 2
Tanel Padar (Tartu Ülikool) 2
Cedric Bois (Université Clermont Auvergne) 1
James Pearce (University of Bath) 1
Jim Harris (CoSector) 1
Mark Aiono (Catalyst IT) 1
Mark Johnson (Catalyst IT) 1
Nathan Nguyen (Catalyst IT) 1
Penny Leach (Catalyst IT) 1
Tatiana Glushchenko (Catalyst IT) 1
Yannik Roth (PH Thurgau) 1

 

We want to acknowledge other groups of people as well who contributed to Mahara 26.04: graphic designers, business analysts, UX researchers, accessibility consultants, testers, translators, documentation writers, system administrators, developers improving supporting infrastructure, and security researchers.

Ngā mihi nui

The 26.04 Release Managers at Catalyst

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