21 May 2021, 5:42

Hello,

at the moment we use 19.04 and want to upgrade till july to 21.04. But we have noticed that the Europass plugin produces a mass of failure notices and even doesn´t work at all. Are there any experiences with this problem? - Last upgrade have been in 2019.

Thanks and greetings from Vienna
Elisabeth

21 May 2021, 17:54

Hi Elisabeth,

There have been a few changes in Mahara that will mean older plugins won't load at the moment.

I've made a fork of that plugin and made some minor adjustments to get it to load on my local 21.04 Mahara

https://github.com/robertlyon777/mahara-artefact-europass

And have alerted the plugin maintainer of these changes so hopefully they will update the official version of the plugin to get it working again.

In the meantime you could test my version to see what more needs fixing

Cheers

Robert

21 May 2021, 19:19

Hi Robert,

thanks a lot for showing us this way - we will try!

Best
Elisabeth

16 June 2021, 19:04

Elisabeth hi.

I will go through the process of updating the Europass plugin including merging the code that Robert Lyon provided so that Europass plugin could be installed within Mahara.

There is one problem with Europass plugin that I cannot resolve since it is not in my domain.

The Europass plugin works by collecting data that user already entered or will enter into Mahara system. Then upon exporting the Europass portfolio user selects the type of document they want. Then the data is formatted into appropriate XML file which is in turn sent to Europass REST API run by European Union. This REST API server then returns the PDF version of Europass portfolio. This is the worflow in a nutshell.

As already mentioned there is a problem. The problem is that the European Union started working on new implementation of Europass. While doing that they already shut down the existing Europass REST API servers (notification and more information available here). That means the old Europass service servers are not working anymore form July 1st 2020 (almost a year now).

On the other hand the European Union still did not provide any new REST API servers for the developers. That means that currently people/users can only create their Europass portfolio via new Europass editor. Until the new REST API service servers are available that unfortunatelly means that users of Mahara will not be able to export their data from Mahara to produce Europass proftolio documents in PDF or other formats.

I also do not know of the timeline when the European Union will provide such services. More information is available here, but in Web servises section at the end of page it says only "This page will be updated. Keep in touch to learn more about the e-Portfolio web services."

16 June 2021, 23:04

Hi Gregor,

thanks a lot for these background informations, which helped us deciding further steps. It is very interesting that the European Union doesn´t continue supporting the Europass Portfolio, which is supposed to be an important instrument in the field of education policy. Anyhow your detailed informations were the missing link to understand why it is how it is... Let me say that we do not know if we are really going to Keep in touch  (with the EU-web services ;).

Thank you very much!

Send you greetings
Elisabeth