23 December 2010, 17:59

Hello,

Starting with the new year, actually on 10 January 2011 (NZDT time), there will be changes to the demo site of Mahara as well as master.dev. We are going to make these changes to

• make it easier for (potential) users to trial Mahara in the latest stable release (demo) and the development version (master)
• make it more difficult for spammers to misuse these sites

These changes will mean that we will have a few accounts set up that also include a bit of content. You do not longer have to register a user name, but can get started immediately. However, you can still set up an account for yourself if you wish to test Mahara with a personal account.

The demo site will be reset each day at a specific time. That means that we will have a fresh installation of a Mahara demo each day.

The master.dev site will have a similar approach only that the reset timeframe will be longer so that users and developers can do more testing on the upcoming features. More details will follow.

For demo site users: If you created views on demo.mahara.org that you wish to keep, you must export them before 9 January 2011 (for the USA: 8 January 2011). As the demo site is that: a demonstration of features and not a supported site for portfolio use, there will be no data transfer to the new demo site.

We hope that these changes will allow you and also new users of Mahara to test features out more easily and quickly without the need of establishing new logins all the time.

Cheers

Kristina

09 January 2011, 16:10

Hello,

We still need to work a bit on the new demo sites (demo and master.dev) and the scripts that make the daily refresh happen. Until then the regular accounts work.

Cheers

Kristina

20 February 2011, 22:04

Hello,

For a number of you this may be the first time that you hear about the changes to the demo site. This is because we had some problems with the news forum sending updates. It seemed to have been a general problem with forums that have lots of subscribers https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/716812

In order not just to have a "testing" post I want to give you a brief update on the demo site. We have had the new demo site up and running for a month now. Anybody interested in seeing the demo does not have to create a new account, but can use any of the pre-existing ones that also have some content in it. The site is reset each day so that no data accumulates.

As far as I can see, this new system works well and I have not yet received help request emails from the demo site about failed registrations etc. For short-term trials, which a demo site should allow for, it seems to work.

If you have suggestions on how to improve the demo site, please let me know as I can put content into it persistently. If you want to see the example portfolios extended, I'd be happy to upload other Leap2A files when you provide the content.

I have already received the suggestion to include the different language packs so that the site is not only in English. We have noted that and look into including them for the next update of the demo site).

Cheers

Kristina