01 January 2016, 9:00

Hi All:

I'm starting a blog for 2016 (it's only taken me 23 years..) and looked into whether I could use the Journal function in Mahara for the purpose, partly to eat my own dogfood and partly because I'll soon be advising a cohort of college students on using Mahara for professional presence.

However, with some reluctance, I've chosen to go with Wordpress.com due to some shortcomings I perceive in the way the Journal works. I've summarized these below for feedback and in hopes that it may be useful for the Mahara road map. I seem to reall some discussion about making the Journal behave more like a blog, but I can't find it.

Hope this helps!

06 January 2016, 10:19

Hello Don,

Thank you for the comparison of the features. I think the Mahara journal fares pretty well in your comparison for not being a blogging platform like Wordpress but having it as part of an array of tools under its belt. :-) (Yes, Wordpress can do so much more these days with all the plugins, but it's a blog at heart.)

Group, institution and site blogs are available in Mahara 15.10. You may still be on an older version of Mahara.

You can achieve email subscription by adding your page to the watchlist. It's a bit of a workaround, but better than nothing.

Sharing of posts on social media automatically as well as having social media buttons is only possible through plugins in Wordpress to my knowledge.

Mahara also has free and paid themes like Wordpress. Granted, it's not as many, but a good start. Dirk already made a few themes for Mahara 15.10. With the new theme starter kit you can also create very simple, stripped down themes in a flash.

If the organization would want to contribute improvements to the current journal functionality to get rid of some of the shortcomings, please let us know. :-)

Cheers

Kristina

07 January 2016, 17:27

Hi Kristina:

All offered in the spirit of continuous improvement, I'm a longtime supporter of Mahara! Certainly Mahara has advantages over Wordpress once you get beyond blogging. Unfortunately, I'm not yet in a position to spark a funded improvement of Journals, worse luck. Maybe the table can be a useful starting point if that happens.

Yes, I'm only on 15.04, I wasn't sure if group blogs were on 15.10. That's a great incentive to upgrade next summer to 16.04.

I guess Wordpress.com have installed the social media sharing plugins: they are available, though I think I'll be careful how I use them.

I'm actually quite pleased with how I can share back to Mahara from wordpress.com via RSS - not only the posts but the comments as a separate stream (but I did have to re-create the graphic):
http://www.savvyfolio.net/user/don/professional-blog-1

I'm going to be parked on this topic over the next couple of months: blogging weekly in Wordpress and helping facilitate a series Mahara Train the Trainer workshops, so I'll likely be revising my opinions. If anyone else cares to weigh in, they'd be welcome.

Kind regards,

Don

08 January 2016, 8:39

Hello Don,

I'm sorry if you misread my reply to your post as criticism or defensive. It was certainly not meant as such and I only stated a few improvements that were already made and made other comments to enhance the information in your table.

Cheers

Kristina

08 January 2016, 11:11

No worries, Kristina!

15 January 2016, 13:41

Hi Don,

Thanks for the detailed comparison! I've entered some of these as Wishlist items in the tracker:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1534385

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1534391

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1534392

As I was considering some of these, it occurred to me that implementing share permission for individual artefacts (something that has been on our wishlist for a long time) would probably make a lot of things easier to do for journals. I think Mahara journals' usability is somewhat hampered by the confusing fact that you have to embed the journal into a page via a block or blocks.

By the way, can you expand on what you mean by taglines and entry summaries? What do these look like in WordPress?

Cheers,

Aaron

29 January 2016, 3:27

Hi Aaron,

not speaking for Don but I'd like to address a couple things. As I understand it, a tagline is a short phrase that describes my blog. Search engines look for those I believe and having a tagline may help with indexing and being found. I like it that Mahara is not easily discovered or indexed by crawlers and some of the Wordpress installations I support drive me crazy because of its focus on SEO and discoreability. From what I see, Wordpress has become a personal and sometimes corporate marketing tool first.

Below are two screen shots that illustrate of what I believe Don means by entry summaries. An author can define how much text is shown, sometimes including a pictures on the front page or on category pages for example. Drupal, Joomla etc have this also and it is called something different in each I believe. The key is that the text author can define a chunk of text, usually starting at the top of their article which will then be displayed elsewhere in the system with a 'read more' or 'Read full article' type link.

I believe Mahara has that already and it does it very well. It does however require the elastic search plugin to be enabled and to be working. You can see below in the search results page using elastic search, the 'Welcome to my PLE' Journal entry has a descriptive paragraph which is the journal description I believe. Mahara actually goes a step further the vanilla Wordpress as it differentiates between journals, pages, groups, media etc. 

Wordpress - edit mode

Wordpress - front end

Mahara - elastic search

29 January 2016, 4:15

Thanks Dirk and sorry Aaron for not monitoring this better.

Thanks Aaron for translating my yearnings into buglist-ese. And I agree that treating the Journal as an independent communication channel may open up new possibilities for syndication...always bearing in mind the usability/age thing. Scaffolding that can be discarded in stages as users develop in capabilities and needs is an ideal to strive for, perhaps not always easy to execute.

I very much appreciate Dirk demoing how elastic search can help with previewing content of blog posts..sounds like I should start thinking about adding it!

I differ with Dirk on the discoverability issue, or would rather add that as students become graduates and alumni and want to make their ePortfolios into lifelong PLE tools as they will want to be discoverable, but on their own terms. It's a balance that begins in early school years and evolves. I mostly deal on the adult end of the spectrum.

29 January 2016, 4:52

Hi Aaron,

I forgot to respond to your comment on Journals needing to be added as blocks: I too think that it is problematic. Being able to discover a users Journal more easily would go a long way I think.

As a workaround I tried adding the Journal block to a profile or  page templates so that it might show up as a 'place holder' but no luck as it wants me to select an actual journal to display. I then thought about adding http://www.yourdomain/artefact/blog/index.php as a link to my profile page for example. Works great for myself but not for anyone viewing the page. There might be wishlists already and I will check but I thought I would add it to the discussion here.