09 January 2011, 15:37

Hi Brett,

version 1.2.4 is the latest Mahara available for that version of Ubuntu.

If you want a more recent version you have two options:

1- upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10 (which has Mahara 1.2.5)

or, as Richard suggested

2- install Mahara manually (i.e. not using the packages provided by Ubuntu)

Cheers,

Francois

11 January 2011, 4:32

Thanks Richard and Francois for your helpful replies.

I was hoping to avoid re-installing the whole system, as this opens the can of worms of having to transfer users/files from my current installation. I'm new to this, plus although there's only 15 students they still don't want much downtime...

I might try an in-place upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 to 10.10 to see if that solves the problem (having backed up first).

Cheers

Brett

11 January 2011, 5:36

Eek! So I have now upgraded my Ubuntu server from 10.04 to 10.10.

Mahara now reports it is running version: Mahara version 1.2.5 (2009111015)

Yet the situation with inserting images into blog posts is exactly the same (i.e. the drop-down to choose images is still missing).

Any ideas? Has the fix not been added to the 10.10 repository yet either?

Cheers

Brett

26 January 2011, 21:05

Hi Brett,

I'm going to try to help :)  and hope I can.  There are several ways you can embed pictures into blogs, and its not too difficult.  I'd like to first understand how you are currently attempting to do that.  So, are you attaching the images to the blog post first, and then selecting the insert image icon on the toolbar  and you don't see an option to choose the attached image? If so, I'm not sure I can fix that part, but I can suggest another option or two (as a work around)

1. In Mahara, go to the Files section and right-click (or ctrl click on a Mac) and copy the Link location.  In your blog, paste that link in where it asks for an Image URL.  (there is an advantage to adding an image that way.  That is that the blog post can be pulled into a view without including a link to download it--directly anyway).

2. I've had a great deal of success using Picasa for storing images.  Picasa provides an embed code for each image.  That embed code can be copied into a blog post by select the html option on the html toolbar.  I could give you more specifics about how that works, and the benefits, if you need them.

I hope this helps. I only dabble with the backend of Mahara and do not feel qualified to address the ubuntu/php stuff, but I am pretty familiar with the frontend part.

Ellen

30 January 2011, 5:37

Hi All,  I don't want to appear dim or anything but I have the same problem on our Mahara running:

31 January 2011, 4:27

Hi all,

First of all, thanks to Ellen Marie Murphy for those helpful workaround suggestions. Your description of the problem we have is accurate.

I think what's going on here is a "last mile" problem. There's a post above, dated last August (i.e. 6 months ago!) stating that this bug has already been solved.

Yet this 'solution' doesn't seem to have found its way into the repositories, nor are there any simple, step-by-step instructions as to how I can apply it to my existing installation. So actually, from a fairly typical perspective (user/typical admin) it doesn't seem like a solution has been made operational at all.

I'm not experienced at this, and I don't want to reinstall the entire system, nor do I want to work independently of the repositories, because then subsequent updates will take a lot more time than I want to spend.

I think comments above from mark terry and Dave Emsley are completely correct. It looks bad to students that image management in Mahara seems stone age. This is essential functionality (and which is advertised to work). In our institution at least, student perception is very low among our test users.

I'm aware that this is an open source system and the forums seem helpful and active. So I'm a bit reluctant to post a reasonably negative, ranting comment about something that looks very promising. But it just seems that at the moment things aren't working. How many more months before this fix makes its way into the STANDARD version?

31 January 2011, 15:25

Dave & Brett:

Unfortunately you really do need to upgrade to 1.2.6 or higher to get this fix.  1.2.5 didn't have it.  The version number '1.2.6testing' is actually less than 1.2.6, it's what we use to indicate that your version is somewhere between the 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 releases.

Dave, you'll be able to fix it by downloading a newer release (1.2.6 or 1.3.3) and following the upgrade instructions:

 http://wiki.mahara.org/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Upgrading_Mahara

Brett, it looks like Ubuntu 10.10 is stuck with the 1.2.5 version which still has the bug, so I think your only option is to move away from the package altogether and install Mahara manually.

 https://launchpad.net/mahara/+packages

R.

25 October 2011, 5:07

Having read all the entries below I am rather confused to find that the lack of functionality still exists in version 1.3. The work rounds suggested by Ellen Marie do work but students are not going to discover this on their own. I have also noted that links from Flickr don't seem to work - I know with self-hosted Wordpress one needs to enable, I think, Atom feeds for this to work so I presume the equivalent is not enabled in Mahara. Again you can work round it by grabbing the full Flickr html and pasting it in (having changed the edit bos to html mode). Once that is done you can use the image icon in the tool bar to set the ohter options.

I think it is a shame this is so difficult as students of the more visual disicplines such as architecture or fine art really need to be able to add inline images to their blogs.

25 October 2011, 14:01

Hello Leo,

You don't need to activate anything in Mahara in order to work with flickr images. If you go to the "View all sizes" page for a flickr photo and then copy the link provided under "Download" (for the size that you want), you only get the URL to the image and can put that into the URL field for the image in the Mahara visual editor.

This is a bit cumbersome but rather a limitation on the flickr side than on Mahara because flickr doesn't make this link more obvious under "Share".

If you want to add images that you have uploaded to Mahara to your blog post, the best and most secure way is to attach the image to the blog post and then you'll have a dropdown menu via the image icon in the visual editor from which you can choose the image. Copying a link from the files area can result in the permissions not being correctly set when other people view the blog post (see this dicussion).

Cheers

Kristina