01 July 2010, 9:38

Hey guys,

have been trawling the forums to find out where the fullscreen button went...

We think this small button is really important if students are to use Mahara to document work, evidence etc on Views. With such a small area, it's very hard to look at a table for example, or even just a paragraph of text with such a small amount of space.

It limits the usability quite considerably.

Just re-iterating.. :)

Thomas Bell

TDM Ltd.

01 July 2010, 16:14

I can only add my voice as well Thomas. I noticed that it is still not working in the 3.0 Beta. It is a major issue as it is too hard to work on full page templates without a full page editor.One other issue I would be interested to get feedback on - are community members having much trouble with SPAM? I am finding so much SPAM gets through on public views that it is almost impossible to keep a view public (or to use public feedback anyway). The CATCHA does not seem to prevent it and there is a limit to how much Viagra we all need!

Cheers, Ian Knox

01 July 2010, 19:04

Hi Ian,

Mahara 1.3 will introduce an improved anti-spam system which we hope will reduce the spam problem (which we also see on mahara.org). It replaces the CAPTCHA with a number of tricks to try to detect and prevent automated spam.

If you'd like to test it out on a non-production server, have a look here:

https://launchpad.net/mahara/+milestone/1.3.0b1

We are looking forward to see how it works out in practice.

Cheers,

Francois

01 July 2010, 20:11

That is great news Francois it has been a reall problem. You can never catch it all II know. Regards, Ian

02 July 2010, 2:39

Awesome news Francois! Have you scheduled a release date yet?

Text Box Resizing is still one of the most requested features among our students!

04 September 2010, 23:08

Same here.  We are creating three institution views (Learner Profile, Four Year Plan and Goals and Transitions Plans) and we are asking the students to update these during the year. A guidance consillor will look at these from time to time and leave comments etc.and connect with the studnets.  These views contain tables and the text box resising is realy a needed feature. It was there before and I am not sure where or why it left.

05 September 2010, 1:06

Unfortunately, the resizing bug has not been fixed in the 1.3 Release Candidate, in fact I think it is worse. I filed a bug report (but think I duplicated a previous one), but I do not think it is considered a priority (I am not great at understanding bug reports though). I have been working with nursing students and it has nearly turned them off using Mahara. For now I am encouraging copy/paste from Word, or use the Google Docs block.

I think I have mentioned before, but in case it was somewhere else, and issue like this could cause massive damage. It was only a few years ago that MySpace was the social media killer application and Facebook blew it away overnight. Why? Because users did not have to use HTML (or generators) at all. That is only my gut feeling, but I must check the literature on it

The work that has been done in 1.3 is fantastic, and I wish I had the talent to contribute more. As a heavy Mahara user though, I also think it is important that we call problems as we see them.

05 September 2010, 2:23

By editing some values in ../js/tinymce/themes/advanced/skins/default/ui.css one could change the default width and height of the editor box to something like what is desired. I think I will aim to get close to 600X800.

Changing the values here produced some good initial results:

05 September 2010, 3:49

Thanks Dirk, that will be a good workaround in the short term. Regards, Ian

26 September 2010, 19:26

Thanks to Dirk Meyer and funding from the Rocky View school district in Alberta, we now have a decent workaround in place for the size of the editor in the text box configuration form.  It will expand the configuration form & tinymce editor for the textbox block to (almost) fill the browser window (see http://master.dev.mahara.org for a demo).  This workaround will make it into v1.4 if we haven't fixed up the problems with the full screen button by then.

For anyone who wants to install the workaround now, there is a patch available here which will apply against 1.3.  Once the patch is installed, add

  $cfg->blockeditormaxwidth = true;

at the bottom of config.php to enable it.