04 April 2020, 7:18

Hello Mahara community,

Today we invite you to preview the upcoming version of Mahara 20.04, which we are planning to release by the end of April. Amongst shifting to work from home for several weeks, the team at Catalyst has progressed finalising this preview version that you can now take for a test drive.

You can download it or access it on Git to install on your own test server. If you do not have a test server available where you can install it, you are welcome to check it out at master.dev.mahara.org.

Please report any issues you come across as soon as possible to us via Launchpad, along with information on reproducing the issue. Find out more about creating a good bug report on the wiki.

We will review your reports and decide whether any of these issues would need to be fixed before the stable release of Mahara 20.04.0. If bugs are found that are critical to the working of Mahara, we may produce another release candidate. Otherwise, this release candidate will become the final 20.04.0 release.

The 20.04 release of Mahara focusses on improvements for organisational efficiency when managing large numbers of accounts because it has tighter integration with single sign-on and takes advantage of automating work flows that administrators had to take care of previously. You can see a list of all new features on Launchpad with the "nominatedfeature" tag.

Some single sign-on highlights include:

• Assign roles automatically based on people's role
• Assign a group administrator account to all groups based on a role
• Create institutions automatically when they are part of the same directory
• Allow students to move their accounts themselves and change their authentication method

Other highlights:

• Switch between interface languages via a toggle in the page header
• Change the default group settings in the site administration
• Restrict the uploading of certain file types
• Display people from one's own organisation first when searching for people to share a portfolio with
• Download all export formats in one download
• Export an entire portfolio or account into a PDF download (experimental)

If you are navigating the site in English, you will notice that we got rid of the word 'user' as much as possible and replaced it with less controversial terms. Translators may also make those changes if their language communities encounter a similar problem.

The Mahara manual is in the process of being updated and not yet available.

You can view a list of all the bugs that have been fixed and new features that will go into Mahara 20.04.

We look forward to your feedback on the new features, and the installation or upgrade process.

Cheers
The Mahara 20.04 release managers at Catalyst

22 April 2020, 18:43

Hello everyone,

Thank you very much to everyone who's been testing the first preview version of Mahara 20.04 and reported any issues.

We made a second preview version available that you can download or access on Git to install on your own test server. If you do not have a test server available where you can install it, you are welcome to check it out at master.dev.mahara.org.

We are well on track for a release of Mahara 20.04 next week. Until then, please continue tesing and giving us feedback so we can see if anything needs to be corrected before Mahara 20.04.0 comes out.

Thank you

Kristina