03 December 2015, 3:52

We have Mahara provided by our Moodle host. As the Director for Instructional Technology I should be the administrator and be able to edit the dashboard , etc.  When I log in I have a page and the Welcome does not have our institution name or other information. I see a line that says: You can edit this text via "Static pages" in "Configure site" in "Administration"" but I can't find that. When I click on the green button for edit dashboard it appears to be my personal page. How do I know I am the administrator? Or that I am logged in as an administrator?

I have professors who want to use this in January and I need to get it ready. I apparently and really clueless. Help!

03 December 2015, 4:39

Hi Bill,

if you are logged in as the site administrator user then there should be a menu called 'Administration' in the main menu.

Kevin

03 December 2015, 5:34

Apparently I am not logged in as the administrator. How can I be made the administrator?

03 December 2015, 13:15

Through the web interface, only an admin can make another user into an admin. They do this by going to the screen "Administration -> Users -> Site administrators" and adding the user there.

If you're using a custom theme, the first thing I would try is to navigate directly to the admin homepage by its URL, in case your theme is maybe not showing the admin header link. The url will be e.g. "http://www.example.com/admin/". That is, the base URL of your Mahara site, followed by "/admin/".

If you are not an admin, you'll be redirected back to the site homepage and see a message that reads "You are forbidden from accessing the administration section."

Assuming that doesn't work, the next thing I'd try is to log in with the default admin username and password. Username: "admin", password: "mahara".

(When you install a Mahara site, after installation the installer logs you in as the "admin" user and prompts you to set a password, so normally the "mahara" password is not actually in place. But it can be there if they ran the installer and then didn't bother setting a password, so it's worth trying.)

If that doesn't work, the only other way to make a user into a site administrator is to directly update their record in the database, which you can do by executing this SQL query:

UPDATE usr SET admin=1 WHERE username='aaronw';

Just replace 'aaronw' with the user's username.

Cheers,

Aaron

23 December 2015, 12:46

Hello Bill,

Could you sort out your admin access? If the site is hosted for you, your hosting company should have site admin access and be able to give the same permissions to you under Administration -> Users -> Site administrators. Otherwise, your institution's IT support should be able to change permissions.

See also http://manual.mahara.org for where to find Mahara functionalities and what you can do as site admin and just institution admin.

Cheers

Kristina