Pair of improvements
highlight Mahara 0.8.2

Mahara -- an open source electronic portfolio, weblog, resume builder and social networking system -- recently released version 0.8.2, the latest stable release of the new 0.8 series.

Mahara 0.8 has two main improvements over the 0.7 series. The first is the addition of MySQL 5 support. Mahara was written from the start against PostgreSQL 8.1, but with a good database abstraction layer that meant that adding MySQL support was relatively straightforward.

The second improvement is the addition of Single Sign On with Moodle. Moodle and Mahara are two naturally complementary systems, Moodle providing the more structured learning environment and course authoring, with Mahara providing the social networking, student centred area. The integration is designed to support Moodle and Mahara being used together in a number of different scenarios, from a one to one relationship, to a number of different Moodles talking to a central Mahara portfolio system, even to multiple Maharas talking to each other. Users can 'roam' seamlessly from one system to another, with no need to create accounts in remote systems or log in more than once.

The next step in the Moodle/Mahara integration will be the ability to transfer pieces of content a user owns in Moodle to their portfolio system. Some of the preliminary design work has been done on this front already, and it is important that Moodle remains Portfolio System -agnostic, and Mahara remains Learning Management System -agnostic. This work is in the process of being fully specified now.

The final improvement in the 0.8 series is increased international support. We are nearing our first official translation, German, and towards that have been fixing a lot of bugs in the language support. The German language pack is expected to be available for the 0.9 release.

Version 0.9 is shaping up to be quite a big release, with a lot of focus on usability, especially around the Views system. As part of the pilot with New Zealand tertiaries, we have been gathering feedback about Mahara's usability, and are really targeting our efforts on trying to make Mahara as simple as possible for our users.

Established in 2006, Mahara is the result of a collaborative venture funded by New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission 's elearning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF), involving Massey University, Auckland University of Technology, The Open Polytechnic of New Zealand and Victoria University of Wellington with Catalyst IT as technology provider. The Mahara project lives at mahara.org.

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