14 September 2009, 19:18

I have several questions and thanks in advance for any information you can supply.

We are in the process of installing Mahara, but several questions have already surfaced from the field and after pouring over everything I can find (User Guides, Quick Reference Guides, Tutorials, etc.) I can't find anything that tells me the answers to these questions:

1.  Is there a limit on the amount of text you can place in any field, but especially the "Body" fields? Is there a word or character limit?

2.  When uploading documents, what file formats are allowed? A list would be most helpful.

3. The Profile page has a spot for Student ID#, but I can't seem to do a search and locate someone based on their ID. Is it possible to search on this field? If not, which fields are searchable? Just the "tags" field?

4.  Can a teacher prevent students from changing their passwords?

5.  We already use Moodle have a Moodle server and many teachers all over our state (California) have Moodle accounts and they use them with their students. Other schools are now interested in ePortfolios, so we will also be the central server for schools all over the state to have accounts. They are wondering how the teachers will be able to search for their students once the students have created accounts. Can each school or each teacher have their own student groups?

Thanks again for your responses.  Linda

14 September 2009, 20:21

Hi,

1. Nope, except for a 1500 character limit on wall posts (to stop people breaking other people's walls). There used to be a bug where there was a ~65000 character limit on some fields if you used MySQL, but that has been fixed.
2. You can upload anything you like. We used to try and restrict this, but it was too unreliable to try and guess the type of file on upload (just looking at the extension isn't a good idea).
3. Don't think it's searchable on by default, but I think you can configure it to be a "public" field, in which case it probably would be searchable. You can do that by going to Site Administration, Administer Extensions, and configure the internal artefact plugin.
4. Nope, though it sounds like a useful feature request. Probably wouldn't take much code to implement
5. Indeed they can - you probably want to use the Institutions functionality for this. It allows you to put students in an institution, then have teachers/school admins become "institutional administrators" in Mahara - which means they can administer those users, but they don't get full site privileges. We used this model on MyPortfolio, which is a nationally hosted service here in NZ - over 150 schools on it at once, and they manage their own users