21 August 2015, 23:29

Hi! What are the current status on multiple installations for the Mahara, let us say 2, installations using the same core?

Is that possible? With different themes and different user bases - the users from the 2 sites should not in any way see each others content etc?!

Best Regards

Niklas

23 August 2015, 14:18

Hello Niklas,

I'm not aware of any work where the same codebase is used to power two different Mahara instances. There is already some code available to "isolate institutions" on one Mahara instance. That would need to be updated and expanded though as it is not fully isolated. Please see the wiki for more information on that.

At the moment, you'd need to set up two separate Mahara instances. However, if your users could see each other's names (and profile pages), you can set up 2 institutions on one Mahara instance. Content from users is not automatically shared with others, but the users decide who shall be able to see what. Only the profile page or at minimum the name and profile picture would be available to users from other institutions directly.

Cheers

Kristina

10 February 2016, 17:35

Sorry for the late reply, I just noticed this topic!

Kristina described two possible scenarios accurately. There's also a third scenario: If what you mean is using the same set of Mahara PHP files to power two Mahara sites, then yes, I have heard of some sites doing that. The basic approach is that you set Apache to point two domain names to the same DocumentRoot, and then you add code to your Mahara "config.php" file to sniff the URL that the web browser was requesting and depending on that you change the database, dataroot, etc, to be the right one for that site.

However, in practice I think this approach causes more problems than it solves. The main advantages of it are that it reduces the space you're using on disk, and it makes upgrades simpler, because there's only one copy of the code to upgrade.

But, Mahara's codebase is only about 75MB, so that's not much disk savings. And, if all sites are using the same copy of the codebase, then they'll also all have to have the same custom themes, plugins, and /local overrides.

So I feel like, if you really want two completely separate Mahara sites, you should just install two completely separate copies of Mahara. (And if you want limited contact between two Mahara sites, consider using MNet for SSO between them.)

Cheers,

Aaron

11 February 2016, 21:55

Hello Niklaus,

For some reason the management board in my institution had decided last year that we have to implement two different Mahara (one for the academics and one for the staff) on the same server.

We worked with a dual address pointing to the same server and used what Aaron suggests in his last post on this forum.

I don't recommend this. Now we found a way to convince our board to have two separate servers running their own Mahara environment. With the first imposed solution we have had some data loss and our server became less responsive than by the past. With a two virtual machine on the same server but running each their own Mahara, we are back with a full operational service, which was not the case last year.

As Aaron says, Mahara code is very light and I personally think that separating the different services is easier to manage the huge number of users' data they come using multimedia artefacts when they built their ePortfolio: easier to back up and also easier to upgrade and/or personalise each copy of Mahara according to the (different) needs of each institution.

In my institution we also have four different platforms for Moodle. They are not running the same version of Moodle because of the difference in the needs of the users on each platform.

For this reason, a multiple platforms approach is, in my view, much better. Nota by the platform I mean virtual machines on the same server with Parallel or VMWare or other OpenSource solution.

Hope this helps

D. JAN