Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 3.. Part 2!

Following from our earlier post about the changes to the portfolio editing section, here is a quick update about some housekeeping, and an a little bonus!

This upgrade, apart from introducing new features and streamlined functions, gives us an opportunity to tidy up the current set of user accounts and settings. Part of this process will be to purge all user accounts that have never logged in.

By default every student at UCS has an account on Mahara, however this model is changing to a self-registration process where staff or students can register for an account if they wish to use the system.

To tidy up any redundant accounts on Mahara we will be deleting any account that has never logged in to the system.

If you are a current student who wishes to use Mahara after the upgrade, instructions will be available on the front page on how to register for an account.

As an added extra for those who do use the system, we will be increasing your upload limit to 250MB, currently users have a set 50MB limit :)

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 3

Only one more week left until Mahara gets upgraded on Tuesday 19th of November!

In the meantime though we'll have a quick look at how portfolio editing has changed.

The way you create each portfolio page hasn't changed, simply a few interface changes and some streamlining has taken place with the upgrade to make sure the process is and easy one.

Firstly when you used to create a portfolio page in the old version of Mahara the first page you were presented with was the adding of content page, however this left many people with an 'Untitled' page until they changed it. Now with the upgrade, when you create a new portfolio page the Title and Description are the first bits of information you edit. See Figure 1 below

Figure 1

When editing a portfolio page after the upgrade, you will notice that the main menu now persists throughout the editing process, making navigation seamless throughout using Mahara, to make this possible, more room was needed to make the editing space not feel cramped. This has been done by consolidating the portfolio artefacts into a side menu instead of the usual menu in the middle of page, see Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

 The process of dragging and dropping each element you require into your portfolio won't change.

We hope these changes, although small will help streamline the portfolio creation and editing process.

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 2

Only two weeks until Mahara gets upgraded!

This weeks spotlight we'll have a peek at the new look and feel of Mahara. This time around we have decided to go completely standard with the graphical user interface (GUI). Before we had a UCS branded blue theme as seen in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

The new upgrade will revert back to what we call a 'Vanilla' theme, basically the default theme the Mahara software comes with, this has several benefits:

1. With it being a standard theme we can utilise already available tutorials and video guides.
2. Alleviate any extra development work when upgrading having to make sure a custom theme still works.
3. Makes moving between potential Mahara systems easier.

Mahara's default theme is green in colour and has the enhanced dropdown menus to aid navigation as seen in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

As you can see the main menu structure has persisted throughout. We hope this upgrade will bring a slicker and smoother navigation experience.

Upgrading to the latest version also brings with it a new responsive framework which detects the screen size you are accessing the site in and adjusts the layout accordingly. If you were to access the site from a mobile device it will adjust the menu and content to a more easily viewable and manageable size as seen in Figure 3 and 4 below.

Old - Figure 3

New - Figure 4

As you can see from the screenshots above, taken on a mobile device, the current UCS Mahara install on the left (Fig 3) half the content is off the screen, however Figure 4 shows that with the new software content has been adjusted to fit into the screen meaning the user will not have to scroll across the screen to access features.

Mahara Upgrade Spotlight - Week 1

With the upgrade of UCS' Mahara happening on the 19th of November, we have decided to fill the following weeks with updates to what will be changing and highlighting new features.

This week we'll be looking a quite a small change but certainly an important one! Before when you used to click on 'Portfolio' you used to get a submenu when the page loaded and an option called 'Share' which would take you to your sharing page.

With the upgrade this has been made a whole lot easier to navigate, for starters all you need to do is hover over the menu item 'Portfolio' and a dropdown menu will now appear showing you all the available options, of which the usual 'Share' option has now been replaced with two separate options, one being 'Shared by me' and 'Shared with me' as shown in figure 1 below.

Figure 1

This will let you quickly navigate to either option and have a more clearer view of what you have shared and with whom.

The dropdown menus are also another feature that will come with the upgrade, this small but effective update will help streamline the navigation within Mahara.