30 September 2013, 20:08

Hi everybody!

We have just published the first release candidate for Mahara 1.8.

This is a call for testing. If you want to make sure that Mahara 1.8 works well on your site, please help us out by testing this first release candidate:

  https://launchpad.net/mahara/+milestone/1.8rc1

New features for the release candidate are listed on Launchpad with the "nominatedfeatures" tag:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-importance&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.milestone%3Alist=61816&field.tag=nominatedfeature

Please see below for some information on high profile features and some instructions on where to find the change.

We have also done lots of bug fixing in this cycle. The full list of changes that have been made for 1.8 can be found on Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bugs?field.searchtext=&orderby=-importance&field.status%3Alist=FIXCOMMITTED&field.milestone%3Alist=61816

If any of the targeted bugs affected your users, this is an opportunity for you to make sure they are fixed properly.

If you do not have anywhere to test it, we have a demo site available that you can use:

http://master.dev.mahara.org

We have completed development and bug fixing on Mahara 1.8, and we are giving you the opportunity to report last minute bugs to be fixed before the final release:

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

If important bugs are found within the next week we may produce a second release candidate. Otherwise this release candidate will become the final release.

Cheers,
The 1.8 Release Managers

Information on high profile changes!

1. Icons and buttons were updated to a more modern style and are more mobile friendly, i.e. bigger and wider spaced. The theme "Default" is the responsive theme (sometimes also called "bootstrapped"). All other themes are not responsive.

2. Skins: In order to activate skins, you will need to add a value to your config.php file: $cfg->skins = true;
Please note that though you can make all sorts of changes using skins, this feature is experimental. At the moment, skins CSS styles may not work well with all built-in themes for all style changes that you make. Skins only work on portfolio pages, and cannot be used to change the entire interface. For that you will still need custom themes or use the configurable theme.

3. The Page builder's artefact / content chooser moved from a horizontal position to the left-hand side, and now floats with you when you scroll down a vertically lengthy Page.

4. Flexible page layouts: When you go to "Edit layouts" on a page, you have more choices available and can also create your own layout based on rows and columns.

5. Files can now be uploaded to a page or into the files area by drag and drop in many places.

6. PDF files can be embedded in a page.

7. Text boxes / notes and resume fields can have attachments.
Please note: Resume attachments can be imported back into Mahara via Leap2a, but they are not automatically associated with the resume field. This is a known issue, but we have not been able to solve it yet.

8. All internal user content can be tagged, i.e. now also text boxes / notes, plans and collections.

9. Fulltext search: Fulltext search is available via Elasticsearch, although currently it's only supported for installations running on PostgreSQL. Hopefully, the implementation for MySQL will come in 1.9. Please see https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Specifications_in_Development/Elasticsearch for more information on getting started with it. Elasticsearch will require a Tomcat server.

10. Additional HTML: you can add additional code such as analytics code into each page by adding a value into your config.php file. Please see /htdocs/lib/config-defaults.php for more information (around line 346).

A few features have already been documented in the user manual. More to come at http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.8/genindex.html#N under "New in Mahara 1.8".