09 March 2018, 8:33

Hello Mahara community,

It's a new year and thus time for a new Mahara release. We are excited to make the first release candidate (RC) for Mahara 18.04 available.

You are invited to download this pre-release version, take it into your test lab to install on a test server, and explore all the new and changed features. If you come across any bugs, please report them as soon as possible. We will then review them and decide whether they would need to be fixed before the stable release of Mahara 18.04.0.

We are planning on making Mahara 18.04.0 available within the first 2 weeks of April 2018. This is earlier than normal as we want to give everyone who needs to upgrade their site to comply better with the GDPR a longer time frame to upgrade before 25 May 2018.

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.

We have numerous new features in Mahara 18.04. The big focus for this release was to add more privacy features to support institutions better to comply with the GDPR, which does not only affect Mahara sites hosted in Europe. All new features are listed on Launchpad with the "nominatedfeature" tag.

This time, the major changes are the following:

• Strict privacy mode to require the consent to the terms and conditions and privacy statement
• Increase the infrastructure to support consenting to terms and conditions and privacy statements for both site and institutions, logging of versions of these documents, and reporting on the status of acceptance
• Possibility for everyone to delete their account
• Password policy and password strength indicator
• Associate groups with institutions
• Links to the Mahara user manual in the footer and in the "Content chooser"
• Copy portfolios as Leap2A files when not logged in
• Rotate images
• Automatic refresh of SAML metadata
• Support for object storage (AWS and Azure exist as plugins)
• Support for Redis as session handler

You can view a video discussing the privacy changes.

We are in the process of updating the user manual and a number of the new features are already documented and accessible via "New in Mahara 18.04".

You can view a list of all the bugs that have been fixed and new features that will go into Mahara 18.04.

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 we can consider to fix them before the 18.04.0 release:

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

In case there are important bugs found that need fixing, we may produce another release candidate. Otherwise, this release candidate will become the final 18.04.0 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.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers
The Mahara 18.04 Release Managers at Catalyst

23 March 2018, 16:37

Hello Mahara community,

We'd like to thank everyone who's tested the first release candidate (RC) of Mahara 18.04 over the last 2 weeks. Some issues were reported that we've fixed.

Therefore, we are issuing a second release candidate that fixes these issues. If you are planning on doing some more testing this week and next week, please utilize this latest version so as not to stumble upon the problems we already corrected.

You can download Mahara 18.04RC2 or access it on Git.

We also updated our release testing instance https://master.dev.mahara.org if you cannot install the release candidate on your own computer or server to check out the new and changed features.

In case you find new bugs, please report them on Launchpad so we can consider to fix them before the 18.04.0 release:

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

If there are major issues found in this release candidate, we will issue another release candidate to fix them.

We would appreciate any testing over the next week (last week of March) in particular, as we are planning on releasing Mahara 18.04.0 within the first two weeks of April.

Thank you very much

The Mahara 18.04 Release Managers at Catalyst

P.S. Find more information about the new features in our announcement about RC1.