mahara.org relaunch

Thursday, November 27. 2008

mahara.org has just been relaunched! Nigel and everyone else have done a great job with the project.

Mahara has come a long way since the original mahara.org was launched, and because of this, we're now actually using Mahara to power mahara.org, rather than Drupal, which is what we had been using for the last 2 or so years.

I'm looking forward to seeing some communities building up over there, everything from developers to translators and practitioners. Actually building the community on a Mahara installation will hopefully see some interesting usage patterns, and since they'll all be in a central place it'll be much easier to showcase best practice.

In related news, I was in Birmingham today for another LEAP day - the standard we're going to be adopting for Mahara import/export, as well as interoperability with other portfolio systems. It was really interesting to see what other portfolio vendors are doing. I have a weird mix of pride and disappointment that we're the only open source portfolio represented in the implementation partners.

Posted by Penny at 21:40 | Comments (5) | Trackbacks (0)

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I took a look at mahara.org - interesting idea, but I'm still confused about the specifics. What other protocols and standards does it use? How does it integrate with Moodle? In short, is there a "webmaster-level intro" for it?

As an aside: can it meet accessibility guidelines and, if so, why does its own website have white link text on a white background?

There are more questions than answers - the more I ask, the less I know.

#1 MJ Ray (Homepage) on 2008-11-28 12:45 (Reply)

It integrates with Moodle over MNET which is the protocol that moodle uses for networking. There's a standard PHP library and I think Drupal has been taught to speak MNET as well. It's basically xmlrpc + ssl. It allows single sign on (and lazy account creation), single sign off, and will allow (in Moodle 2.0, quite a way off) portfolio-ish data to be transferred (eg completed assignments).

Others - we've received some JISC funding for implementing LEAP which i the portfolio standard they're developing... oh I guess you read that already, it was in the blog post. In general, we've been avoiding standards for standards sake. If something good and interesting comes along we're open to it.

It does not meet accessibility guidelines and won't work even without javascript :( This is a legacy problem that we're working slowly to improve (open source, need funding etc, you know the story :) )

#1.1 Penny Leach (Homepage) on 2008-11-28 14:36 (Reply)

Where is the white text on white background? That's useful feedback but I can't immediately see it.

#1.1.1 Penny Leach (Homepage) on 2008-11-28 14:36 (Reply)

I think div#subnav > ul > li > a on http://mahara.org/about is one example.

#1.1.1 MJ Ray (Homepage) on 2008-11-30 14:50 (Reply)

Hmmmm, now we've talked about this irregular posting!! Updates!

#2 CJ on 2008-12-09 05:46 (Reply)

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Thursday, November 27. 2008

mahara.org relaunch