12 May 2009, 9:35

Hi Everyone,

 I see that most people here discussing Maraha are using it primarily in educational environments. I am looking to create a social networking website for the alumni of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. I have installed mahara on my personal webspace to tinker with it, and it seems to be very close to what I am looking for. We would like to collect information about graduates of our program that would be of interest to the department (as well as fellow alumni and prospective graduates) such as work history, salary information, feedback on job-preparedness, et al... as well as provide a place for alumni to communicate with one another regarding job openings in their current companies, information about a city, events and get-togethers, and more. The ePortfolios are perfect for this. Is there any type of built-in calendar/event management with mahara? Forum support? Polls?

 Has anyone else done something similar to this? Is there a plugin repository anywhere? I can do some developing myself, but there is no need to reinvent the wheel if plugins have already been developed for some things I'd like to do. Any help, advice, and thoughts are greatly appreciated. This is a fantastic product, and I think it is exactly what I am looking for.

 Thanks in advance!

12 May 2009, 13:39

Hi Blake,

Great to see you're  interested in Mahara for a slightly different use-case.  You're using forums in Mahara right now - they live inside Groups.

Groups have a plugin system called 'interactions' which is a way to add collaborative activities to Mahara.  Forums are an interaction plugin, polls could be another.

There is a plugin repository - mahara has a 'contrib' directory on http://git.mahara.org but it's not that rich at the moment.   If you do write a poll plugin for example, it would be great to get it into contrib!

Cheers

Penny

13 May 2009, 3:44

Hello both,

As I wrote in another post, I think that it would be useful to create a menu in the front page for "Pluggins & Themes" linking it with the database of all the contributions -pluggins, themes, translation interface, etc- that community members are developing. I think that the interface of that database should be easier to use that GIT, which is not so intuitive at the beginning even for Linux users.

At the moment, there are already some contributions in the Mahara GIT repository, but they are difficult to spot and  download.   The idea is to create a database where users can type the feature/s they are looking for, and once the corresponding pluggin is found, they can download the gz or zip file easily, like for example, the Mahara project in Eduforge.

I don't have much experience working in Open Source projects, so perphaps you have already had identified other software more suitable for that database.

 Regards

 

13 May 2009, 15:33

Hi - this is definitely on the list of stuff to do! Currently we're swamped with Mahara 1.2 related work though. But yes, it would be great to get up a section of the site that showcases plugins and themes etc.

13 May 2009, 8:03

Thank you for your help and directions. I hope to get something up and running in the near future. I'll report back with what I come up with, and yes, if my poll plugin is up to snuff I would be happy to contribute it to the community.