Developer Area/Developer Meetings/69

Agenda for the 69th Mahara developer meeting on Tuesday, 29 January 2019, 7:00 UTC

We will meet using Meet.Catalyst (a Catalyst staff member will initiate the call).

Our #mahara-dev channel on Freenode IRC will be our backup or in case there are problems with the web conferencing tool and we'll need to chat to resolve it. If you don't have an IRC client, you can join us using your web browser.

• Chair: Cecilia Vela Gurovic
• Minute taker: Rebecca Blundell

Agenda

1. Topic from previous meeting:
   1. Robert to look more into the authentication between mahara.org and git.mahara.org.
   2. Robert to look more into migrating items from Launchpad into git.mahara.org for testing purposes so we can get a better understanding of what it'll look like in the end.
2. Progress on Mahara 19.04 (Kristina)
3. Next meeting and chair
4. Any other business

Present

Cecilia Vela Gurovic, Catalyst NZ, Wellington, NZ (chair)
Kristina Hoeppner, Catalyst NZ, Wellington, NZ
Rebecca Blundell, Catalyst NZ, Wellington, NZ (minutes)
Liam Sharpe, Catalyst NZ, Wellington, NZ
Robert Lyon, Catalyst NZ, Wellington, NZ
Ghada El-Zoghbi, Catalyst AU, Sydney, Australia
Neal Lawrence, community member, UK

Meeting summary

Robert's progress on previous meeting's action points

1. authentication between mahara.org and git.mahara.org
2. migrating items from Launchpad into git.mahara.org

• Robert looked at migrating the Mahara bugs and wishlist items on gerrit and Launchpad to Mahara's Gitlab instance and now has a pretty good idea of what it takes to export the tracker items from Launchpad and import them into Gitlab.
• We're going to rename the Launchpad statuses to be more useful, as well as looking at using tags in GitLab to better reflect what we need for Mahara. We will have full control on Gitlab and will not be restricted to the Launchpad statuses. We will also employ tags to further distinguish items.
• Currently that work (authentication and tracker item move) is on hold as removing triggers is more urgent.
  

Removing triggers

• Triggers are causing problems, particularly in the UK on cloud-hosted sites.
• We're aiming to have the triggers removed for Mahara 19.04. Robert made a start with Elasticsearch: https://reviews.mahara.org/9401
• Ghada is very happy! :D
  

Progress on Mahara 19.04

Smart Evidence editor - update

• This has been a wishlist item for a long time as editing your framework as correctly formatted JSON is laborious and non-userfriendly.
• Rebecca has implemented a 3rd party library discovered by Cecilia which allows the submitting of framework content via a web-form as well as the ability to edit or copy an existing one to adapt to your needs.
• This is in the final stages of development right now, and Rebecca hopes to have all the functionality needed for the 19.04 release finished this week.
• Please feel free to download the patch and test: https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/9476<

Bootstrap 4

• Liam, who was involved in the upgrade to Bootstrap 3, is now upgrading his original work on Bootstrap Mahara to Bootstrap 4.
• The Raw and Default themes are done, and he is currently working on Modern. As he does he will keep documentation to assist others who need to upgrade their themes. While the move to Bootstrap 4 is a huge chunk of work, upgrading individual themes – now that we have some experience and can document common changes – is not such a huge effort. We will gain more experience over the next two weeks and will have more certainty as Pixel needs to be replaced by rem to allow gulp to work.
• Evonne will use Liam's documentation to work on upgrading the Ocean and Primary School themes, which will mostly be find and replace and colour adjustments.
• After the core themes have been upgraded, we will be better able to estimate the upgrade process for clients' custom themes. The complexity will depend on how many customisations have been made.

Other new features

Testing isolated institutions

https://reviews.mahara.org/#/q/owner:gregor.anzelj%2540gmail.com+status:open

• Kristina is running through another round of testing after changes have been made to progress this feature. There are lots of items to test so that we cannot yet say whether it will be in Mahara 19.04.

Forum posts can now have attachments

• This is a feature requested by several community members.
• Recording Arts Canada and Verein zur Förderung eines Offenen Deutschen Schul-Netzes that works with schools have co-funded the development work.

Group admins can prevent members from unsubscribing

• An example of use is if students enrolled in a course need to receive messages from the group for their work, the admin can ensure they get them.
• This is also a feature funded by Recording Arts Canada.

For more information on new features for 19.04 see:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bugs?field.milestone%3Alist=86453&field.tag=nominatedfeature

19.04 release dates

• We're looking at the 3rd or 4th week of April for the 19.04.0 release
• The feature freeze will be in the next couple of weeks, with the design freeze a few weeks later.
• We'll aim for a Release Candidate by the end of March / beginning of April

Record meetings?

• Robert suggested recording the dev meetings might be useful, particularly for the minute-taker.
• Is this possible/ potentially useful?

Action: Kristina to look into recording.

Next meeting and chair

Next meeting:
Tuesday, 19 March 2019, 8pm (NZ time) https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20190319T07&p1=1440
Kristina to be chair
Minutes: Rebecca

Action summary

Kristina to look into recording the meetings