17 April 2012, 0:54

After more than 10 months of development and bug fixing, we are proud to announce the final release of Mahara 1.5:

https://launchpad.net/mahara/1.5/1.5.0

Out of the 84 recorded new features and over 300 bug fixes, we would like to highlight some.

Theming

• A new theme for younger students called "Primary School"
• Optional drop-down menus for the site navigation
• Support for institution logos to replace the site header logo
• New institution theme with configurable colours

Pages and blocks

• Reusable text boxes, a.k.a. "Notes"
• Block to display journal entries with a particular tag
• Block to display a user's watchlist
• Improvements to online users sideblock (e.g. limit on number of users to display)
• Image gallery displays external galleries (flickr, Panoramio, Photobucket, Picasa, Windows Live)
• Support for embedding content from Glogster, Prezi, Slideshare, Vimeo, Voki and WikiEducator
• Add an option to include feedback in HTML export
• Implementation of the SafeIFrame feature of HTML Purifier to facilitate the use of specified iFrames

Copying and sharing

• Copying of collections
• Pages and collections can be shared with institutions
• Allow original author of a copyable page to retain permission to see copies of the page
• More search options on "Shared pages"

Usability and documentation

• Added and updated many help texts and descriptions
• Improvements to search usability
• WYSIWYG fullscreen option
• Profile pictures are available in the files area
• Multiple file uploads
• Institution landing page listing institution admins and staff

Groups

• Users can suggest and invite others to groups
• Group admins can hide members
• Group and group member CSV uploads
• Group file quotas

Admin tools

• Admins can suspend, delete, and change the authentication method for multiple users in one action
• Admin report on user pages access lists
• Support for custom links in the footer menu
• User file quotas are configurable by institution and visible on the user accounts page
• Set general account preferences when adding users for internal authentication
• Allow institutions more control over access to user profiles
• Allow site admin to specify a default notification method for new users
• MNet key regeneration button and functions to export dashboard info to Moodle
• User CSV upload can make updates to existing users
• Sitemap generation
• CLI install and upgrade abilities for unattended installations

Security and authentication

• BrowserID authentication method
• More user-friendly password policy with password salts, bcrypt storage and brute force prevention
• Student ID and display name can be set from LDAP
• Confirmation of new user registrations via self-registration method prior to account creation

See the full list of bug fixes (more than 300!) here:

https://launchpad.net/mahara/+milestone/1.5.0

New Features for the Release Candidate are listed on Launchpad with the newfeature tag:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bugs?field.tag=newfeature

How to install / upgrade

You can find instructions on how to install a new Mahara site or upgrade an existing one on our wiki:

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator's_Guide/Installing_Mahara
https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator's_Guide/Upgrading_Mahara

If you are looking for translations, have a look at this page:

https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Language_Packs

End of security support for Mahara 1.3

As per our security policy, we only offer security support for the last two major releases of Mahara (1.4 and 1.5).

If you are running a 1.3 installation, make sure you upgrade to 1.5 now. On the other hand, if you are running 1.4, then you have until 1.6 is released to upgrade.

All site administrators running a supported version of Mahara are encouraged to subscribe to our security announcements:

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/view.php?id=43

Support and bugs

If you find any bugs in this new release, please feel free to use our bug tracker to report them:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug

The user manual has been updated to reflect the changes that we have made for Mahara 1.5. New features are listed under the "New in Mahara 1.5" index entry.

And if you need help with anything, the support forum is the best place to ask your questions:

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/view.php?id=2

Security bug bounty

Security is very important to Mahara developers. As potential issues are reported to us, we will test, patch and release fixes as quickly as possible. We also now have a security bug bounty programme in place that will reward researchers for finding security issues and disclosing them to us.

For more information, the conditions and the cash rewards, please go to the Mahara Security page:

https://mahara.org/security

Credits

We would like to thank the following organisations for funding the features and bug fixes that have gone into Mahara 1.5 (in alphabetical order):

• Birmingham City University
• Catalyst IT
• Deltak edu
• Education Services Australia
• Goucher College
• Lancaster University Network Services
• New Zealand Ministry of Education
• PLANE
• Rocky View Schools
• Two Sense Media
• United World College of South East Asia
• University of Canberra

Mahara Partner fees also contributed to enhancements and infrastructural support.

We would also like to highlight all of the people who have contributed code to this release:

And the organisations they work for:

And finally the most complete translations at the time of writing:

• Japanese (Contributor: Mitsuhiro Yoshida)
• Greek (Contributors: Ioannis Katsenos, Kostas Milonas and Yannis Kaskamanidis)
• French (Contributors: Dominique-Alain Jan, Pascale Hyboud-Peron, Laurent Opprecht and Philippe Petitqueux)

- The 1.5 Release Managers

17 April 2012, 19:18

Hello,

dajan translated the release notes into French and Iñaki into Spanish. How great is that?

dajan: "Pour ceux qui préfèrent lire le message du lancement de #mahara 1.5 dans la langue de Molière, c'est ici https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=4473"

Join the French community to read the announcement.

Iñaki: Publicado de Mahara 1.5: las notas de la versión 1.5 de Mahara: https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=4476

Join the Spanish community to read the announcement.

Cheers

Kristina