16 June 2015, 12:10

Hello,

This is an advance notice and an invitation for everyone to check out the upcoming Mahara 15.10 version. We are still at work for it but just merged in a huge chunk of work by our front-end team: Bootstrap.

What does this mean?

• All themes can be based on Bootstrap.
• The look and feel in a number of areas changed slightly but generally, functionality staid the same. There were lots of ideas of how to change things, but we needed to get the main functionality converted first so as to have the basics. :-)
• Some changes were made to go with the times and current practices in web design.
• Developers familiar with Bootstrap may find it easier to create a theme for Mahara.
• Support for Mahara 15.04 for security fixes will be provided until October 2017 to allow those instances that cannot move to Bootstrap quickly to still stay supported until their functionality can be upgraded.

There is still a long ways to go for finalizing the Bootstrapped theme, but we wanted to get it into Mahara already so that we base new functionality on Bootstrap and don't have to re-do things closer to the release date. Furthermore, it gives us more time to find and fix bugs.

There are a number of known issues that we are going to address. If you want to help fix bugs, please feel free to get involved and help.

Right now, the new Mahara is still unthemed. Our core designer is going to create the new raw theme from which all other themes can inherit (though it's not necessary anymore). After that, the default theme will be created as well as a few other new themes that will ship with Mahara out of the box. Beyond that: The sky is the limit.

So, if you check out Mahara master, you will get the Bootstrap un-theme directly. Over the next few weeks, we will be making additional changes, bug fixes and add the first proper themes in. But please feel free to already have a nosey around and help fix outstanding issues.

Cheers

Kristina

16 June 2015, 15:17

Hi Kristina,

your post inspired me to set this up and give it a try.

I can see some pretty nice improvements on the in-page tabs of a group. Looking forward to ow this will pan out.

Dirk

17 June 2015, 9:06

Hello Dirk,

Thank you for giving it a spin already. :-) The group navigation is one of those areas that would need to see a bit more attention for mobile devices. We are thinking to turn that top menu into a sort of slider for easier navigation on a small screen.

Cheers

Kristina

17 July 2015, 10:15

Hi Kristina,

Where can I grab a copy of 15.10?

Thanks.

18 July 2015, 4:45

Hello Robin,

Since Mahara 15.10 has not yet been released, we have not packaged it up. However, you can set up a local environment using Git as described at https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Developer_Area/Developer_Environment

If you don't have Linux, please send me a message and I can provide you the link to a virtual machine that you can download. I don't want to make the link public just yet as I need to change the VMs and update them.

Or you can take a look at http://master.dev.mahara.org Please note that the code on that site is now a couple of weeks or so old as it's not updated automatically.

Cheers

Kristina

22 July 2015, 19:16

Hi Robin,

In addition to what Kristina said, you can download the very latest development version of Mahara from our git repo on git.mahara.org: https://git.mahara.org/mahara/mahara/tree/master

Just click the "Download zip" button in the upper right. It'll give you a zip file that is installable just like the zip you'd download from mahara.org's "Download" link.

Though for anyone who tries that, keep in mind that the development version of Mahara is not guaranteed to be stable and should not be used for production purposes. It's only for testing & development.

Cheers,

Aaron