Add a theme
You can add a theme to your site easily by copying the theme folder into the /theme folder on Mahara. It is then available for you to choose in the site settings as well as institution settings.
Using the browse theme
The browse theme is functionality to allow users to change the theme in which they see most of their site. Most of the time, it is controlled by the institution themes, but users could be allowed to choose any theme in which to browse the site. You would need to add the following value to your config.php file:
$cfg->sitethemeprefs = true;
Pages are still going to be created in the institution theme though.
Add skins
Users can use skins to create individual designs for their portfolio pages and express themselves more. Skins must be allowed first in the Mahara config.php file in order to be used. The following value needs to be added:
$cfg->skins = true;
If a theme should not use skins, e.g. to preserve the corporate design of the theme, the following value can be used in the theme file themeconfig.php to not allow skins:
$theme->skins = false;
Import portfolios in bulk
If a site administrator created a bulk export of portfolios, a system administrator will need to place the file into a specific directory on the server in order to import it again.
Allow custom / clean URLs
Normally, pages, groups and artefacts that users create on Mahara are identified by a numerical ID only. In order to make URLs to pages and groups more readable, "clean URLs" were introduced a few versions ago. Site administrators can re-generate these custom URLs in the site administration once the feature has been enabled and configured.
Information for the configuration is available on the wiki.
Remove "Copy of" for pages
When you set up a Mahara out-of-the box, users who copy a page get "Copy of [title of the page" and will need to remove the "Copy of" in many cases. If you don't want the "Copy of" displayed, you can add the following config value to your Mahara instance:
$cfg->renamecopies = false;
Creative Commons license
Considerations for system administrators by Kristina Hoeppner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from Kristina Hoeppner.
Create your own quick theme
From Mahara 15.10 on, you can create a very simple theme using the "subthemestarter". Instructions on how to install the necessary files on your server are provided in the README file in the /theme folder. The subthemestarter theme contains a variables file in which you can change the color values and you are set to have your own theme.
In order to customise or create a new theme, a Mahara installed via Git is used. If you have installed / upgraded via a zip / tar file, the relevant Gulp / SASS files will not be present.
If you want a version with these files, but do not want to use Git, please go to https://git.mahara.org/mahara/mahara/tags and download the relevant release of the version of Mahara for which you want to create a theme.
Change words on the interface
Sometimes you may not like the language that is used on your Mahara site. There are a couple of ways of correcting that.
- If you see words that are spelt incorrectly or where there is no translation yet, you can go to out translation tool and correct the words in the main translation. Mahara can already be translated into numerable language packs
- If the words are correct, but your organization uses different terminology, you can create a local language repository in which you keep all your changes to prevent you from having your changes overwritten when you change to a new version of Mahara.
Change the dashboard links
If you do not like the three links "Create" - "Share" - "Engage" on the Mahara dashboard, you can change them in /htdocs/theme/[theme]templates/homeinfo.tpl. If you change them in "raw", they will be changed in every theme. If you only change them in your organization's theme, other themes won't be affected.
Distinguish between live and test site
We recommend that a test server is used on which new code is deployed first and tested there before the production / live site is updated. In order to aid seeing the difference between a test and production site, you can put the following config value into your config.php on the test server:
$cfg->productionmode = false;
This value will also output error messages to the screen and put performance information into the page footer.