28 October 2015, 8:20

29 October 2015, 6:45

This would be a valuable functions to add, along with being able to search projects (for potential partnership and collaboration activity) I know that various third party attemts have been made to bring this sort of functionality into Mahara but have not seen how the process works for these to move forward into the core.

Which brings me to a thought I have wanted to share for some time. How does code developed by third parties get considered for review and possible inclusion?

And, how about developing come kind of 'community of users' crowd-funding approach to bringing new features on board - I have seen it suggested that an outfit with a feature request could 'fund' the development but that is a bit daunting for us smallies whereas looking at a list of potential add-ons and being able to lob in $200 to help move on something we'd like to see added in, would be much more possible.

I'd be pleased to help make this work ...

02 November 2015, 16:54

Hi Andrew,

I've written an outline of how the Mahara software project is developed, on the wiki here: https://wiki.mahara.org/wiki/Developer_Area/Mahara_project_overview

For third-party code, to get into core, the process is basically:

1. File (or find) a Launchpad bug about the change: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara

2. Push the code into the Mahara code review site: https://reviews.mahara.org

3. Politely bug the Mahara review team to review the code (this may take a while :)

4. Make any needed revisions politely noted by the Mahara review team.

5. Repeat steps 3 & 4 until the code is ready to be merged into core.

Large changes, unfortunately, have a tendency to languish in code review for a long time, because they take a lot of effort to review to make sure they won't cause bugs or security problems. A quicker alternative is to write your change as a stand-alone plugin, and then we'll put a link to it in the Mahara plugins database: https://wiki.mahara.org/wiki/Plugins . We try to be willing to add any necessary hooks to Mahara to support different types of plugins, in order to make that easier.

As far as crowdfunding, this has been an idea discussed at Mahara conferences but no one's been quite able to get it off the ground yet. One thing we have done at Catalyst IT is start our "Support packages" system as a way to make it easier for smallish organizations to fund Mahara code. And that has funded a few small improvements: http://www.catalyst.net.nz/what-we-offer/learning-and-development/mahara-support-packages

Cheers,

Aaron

03 November 2015, 2:32

Hi Andrew,

Domi Sinclair is going to have a session next week at Mahara Hui UK on the topic of crowdfunding. I am looking forward to this session (besides all the others!) because I hope we'll be able to determine how this can take off. So far, I've found it rather difficult as not everybody would contribute at the same time, then money may not be available anymore once others have come on board etc. So any practical ideas will be good to hear from the people who'd be interested in a crowd-funding approach. Hope you can make it to the hui in Southampton to chip in.

Cheers

Kristina

02 November 2015, 16:21

Unfortunately, this is a little bit tricky in Mahara at present. I think you'd need to do this:

1. Have users enter their skills into their Mahara resume

2. Have the user display their skills by putting the "resume" block onto a page and sharing that page with "Public" or with "Registered users"

3. Set up the Mahara Elasticsearch plugin, which will then index all the resume's and make them searchable.

The tricky part here, is that even after users fill in their resume, the resume content is not visible to anyone else until they display their resume on a page and make that page visible to others. And Mahara doesn't have good built-in search capabilities, which is why it's also necessary to use the Elasticsearch plugin.

Cheers,

Aaron

03 November 2015, 2:02

Thanks for your detailed reply. Unfortunately, elasticsearch is not yet installed in my environnement. I hope it will be soon.

However, I've been looking for its parameters and found that academicskill, workskill and personnalskill are availables. Do I need to use your method if I select those items?

Thanks.

Manu