29 September 2017, 23:03

Hello Mahara community,

Half a year passes very quickly in the world of Mahara and it's time again for a release candidate (RC) as we are preparing for the release of Mahara 17.10. We have now release release candidate 1.

We invite you to take a close look at this pre-release version to test it thoroughly and report any bugs to us that you may come across so we can make the stable version a good one by getting rid of major issues before the release in the third or fourth week of October depending on how the testing goes.

If you have a test server or a developer instance, please do a test upgrade. While we test in different environments, we may not be able to catch all exceptions that you deal with. Therefore, your testing on your own infrastructure would be much appreciated. But please don't upgrade your production site just yet. ;-)

You can download the release candidate or access it on Git.

What is new in Mahara 17.10? As usual, we have a number of new features that are listed on Launchpad with the "nominatedfeature" tag.

This time, the major changes are the following:

• New reporting section consolidating all statistics and reports in one area
• Advanced reporting (in conjunction with Elasticsearch) - initial results of the AAIM project
• Elasticsearch upgrade to a modern version of Elasticsearch.
• Search for notifications
• Consolidation of the page settings screens and buttons on all editing screens
• Support the upload of a second logo for small devices
• Group homepage to list all members that have not submitted anything to the group
• Display of image via data base64
• Configuration of ADFS via the SAML authentication option

Some of these new features are looked at in a recent presentation.

We are in the process of updating the user manual and will have documentation available soon (envisaged by 8 October 2017).

You can view a list of all the bugs that have been fixed and new features that will go into Mahara 17.10.

If you reported bugs and they have been fixed, pay particular attention to them and check that all is working now.

In case you find new bugs, please report them on Launchpad so they can consider to fix them before the 17.10.0 release:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+filebug

In case there are important bugs found that need fixing, we may produce a third release candidate. Otherwise, this release candidate will become the final 17.10.0 release.

You can use our developer instance http://master.dev.mahara.org to check out the new features of Mahara (that don't require site administrator access) if you can't install it yourself. This instance will be updated on 2 October 2017.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers
The Mahara 17.10 Release Managers

13 October 2017, 15:18

Hello,

Thanks to everyone who's tested the first release candidate (RC) of Mahara 17.10 over the last two weeks. We've fixed a few issues that have come up and thus issue a second RC.

You can download it at https://launchpad.net/mahara/17.10/17.10rc2

New features for 17.10 have been documented in the user manual: http://manual.mahara.org/en/17.10/new.html

If you do not have an instance on which you can test this RC, you can use https://master.dev.mahara.org

We look forward to your feedback and are still well on track for the final release before the end of the month.

Cheers

Kristina

on behalf of the Mahara 17.10 release team