11 April 2025, 11:36

Hello everyone,

It's April and thus release month at Mahara HQ in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. We'd like to invite you to take this upcoming version of Mahara 25.04 for a spin to check out the new functionalities.

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 25.04_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. Since this is a preview version, we do not yet recommend using it live as there can still be some changes. We would love for you to upgrade a non-production site though and give Mahara 25.04 a good test there though to see if there are any issues that we would need to fix up prior to the Mahara 25.04.0 release.

If you come across any bugs, please report them by 22 April if possible. We will then review them and decide whether we can still fix them before the release of Mahara 25.04.0 by the end of April 2025 or whether they will go into a later release.

There are a number of new features in Mahara 25.04. A few notable ones are

• Expansion of the continuing professional development (CPD) functionality to track entire programmes of CPD
• Outcomes portfolios can be copied
• Peer assessment changed to allow for peer and self assessment
• New icon font using Material icons instead of Font Awesome
• 'Image' and 'Image gallery' blocks are combined
• New assessment result option in submissions to track external assessments
• Lock and unlock portfolios that use the 'Review' functionality via the administrator interface
• Portfolio completion and outcomes overview pages can have skins
• PDF block can have flexible height
• Set a custom maintenance message when you close a site for an upgrade
• Escalate issue reports directly to the Mahara core team (after you've done your own due diligence)

These features will soon be documented in the Mahara manual for Mahara 25.04.

You can view a list of all the issues that have been fixed and new features that will go into Mahara 25.04.

If you reported issues 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 25.04 Release Managers at Catalyst