10 April 2024, 18:11

Hello everyone,

It's release month here at Mahara HQ in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, and thus time for the preview version of Mahara 24.04.

Subscriber representatives have two options to access the code:

• via the Git repository for compiling on their own environment. Make sure you select the branch 24.04_DEV.
• via the download page for the release candidate where the theme and third-party libraries are precompiled.

Follow the upgrade instructions if you want to upgrade one of your non-production sites.

If you come across any bugs, please report them by 19 April if possible. We will then review them and decide whether we can still fix them before the release of Mahara 24.04.0 by the end of April 2024, or whether they will go into a later release.

There are a number of new features in Mahara 24.04. A few notable ones are

• SmartEvidence version 2 with multiple assessors and an extra assessment status
• Retrieving of deleted content
• Easier bug reporting to administrator
• CPD plugin is part of Mahara core
• Display active account holder count in reports
• Show recently used block types
• Allow AI reflection bot Riff to be embedded within Mahara
• Block copying
• Dark mode

Watch the video embedded below to get an overview of these features.

These features will soon be documented in the Mahara manual for Mahara 24.04.

You can view a list of all the issues that have been fixed and new features that will go into Mahara 24.04.

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

You can use our developer instance to check out the new features of Mahara that don't require site administrator access if you can't install it yourself.

To introduce the new features, I have scheduled three sessions to cater to different time zones. Pick the one that suits you best.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you
Kristina
on behalf of the Mahara 24.04 Release Managers at Catalyst