21 October 2009, 6:01

Hello!

Liip (the Swiss Mahara partner) are sponsering a Mahara hackfest day, where employees who are interested in getting into Mahara development (either because they're just interested, or because they might have upcoming projects that involve Mahara) can all sit around a table together for a day and hack on stuff.  This is usually to push out some small feature and get people familiar with Mahara.  I'll probably not be doing any coding myself, just helping people find their way around, doing code review and showing people the ropes.

I have some ideas for small "hackfest sized features" and of course a huge list of stuff that I'd really love to add to Mahara, but I wanted to poll the community on whether people can think of some small, but big impact features. 

This won't be in time for 1.2, but if we get something interesting done and the code to a reasonable standard, it's possible it could be included in 1.3.

Any ideas welcome! 

Cheers,

Penny

22 October 2009, 2:16

Or even 1.2.X. To be honest, I'm not that fussed about including small features in point releases 

Some things off the top of my head:

• Blocktypes for your favourite website
• Do a lot more around showing who is online. E.g., fix the online users block to not be so massive when 15 people are online, show online status by people's names in various places where it makes sense (forums come to mind)
• Role visualisation - a little icon beside admins/staff/tutors, so people know who the bosses are! 
• Make clicking on people's names open up a little business card with some basic information about the person, rather than taking the person off to their profile page (maybe still do that if they don't have JS). The little business card could have picture, introduction, maybe some other fields (respecting public fields etc), a link to the profile page and to some of their views maybe? Admins could see a link to log in as them.
• Improve the help stuff. We know that nobody clicks on the little ? icons. Would be better if the help was more visible, and the javascript and CSS that displays it could be a lot better. Anyone there able to make videos? We could link some embedded videos into the help boxes. And maybe we could actually put some help text alongside form elements rather than in the little popups.
• Find some magical HTML to PDF thing, and integrate it so we can generate PDFs of Views (even if it isn't core - e.g. using PrinceXML)
• iPhone CSS!!
• Allow users to choose their own theme (if the site admin & their institution admins have allowed this)

22 October 2009, 8:28

Would there be any interest in some library functionality which lets you keep track of (educational) books you read?

I'm thinking of something were you can enter a ISBN/EAN code and then the Information about the book gets imported automatically. Maybe also give the possibility to link to external library services (like www.librarything.com).

26 October 2009, 13:13

Maybe it's a bit of a niche feature, but integrating help files translation to David Mudrak's adminlang work would be big a plus for language maintainers that don't know HTML/PHP.

The Basque language translation team would really appreciate it :-)

Saludos,
Iñaki.

26 October 2009, 13:43

I am very keen on being able to give each View a more customisable look. I suggest that this could include as a minimum:

specifying the background colour
option to add a header image with alignment options
option to add a background image with tile/alignment options

Best wishes,
Mike