Developer Area/Developer Meetings/75

Agenda for the 75th Mahara developer meeting on Thursday, 17 October 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: Robert Lyon
• Minute taker: Kristina Hoeppner

Agenda

1. Items from the last meeting
   • Gregor to create bug report around the issue he encountered exporting users from one instance and importing them into another
   • Robert looking at possibilities of posting audio recordings of meetings online
   • Peter using Docker with Selenium to run Behat tests
   • Peter testing of trigger patches
   • Remember... progress setting up Docker images with Mahara (intern)
2. Mahara 19.10 update
3. Guillaume's project
4. Next meeting and chair
5. Any other business

Minutes

Attendees

• Ghada El-Zoghbi from Catalyst IT Australia in Sydney
• Guillaume Nerzic, France / UK, first time on dev meeting
• Kristina Hoeppner from Catalyst IT in Wellington (minute taker)
• Lisa Seeto from Catalyst IT in Wellington
• Rebecca Blundell from Catalyst IT in Wellington
• Robert Lyon from Catalyst IT in Wellington (meeting chair)

Topics from last meeting

• Gregor: Not in today's meeting to report back
• Robert: We didn't yet have time to explore recording options
• Peter: Not in today's meeting to report back
• Mahara intern: Application deadline is 18 October 2019. Looking into interviews soon.

Mahara 19.10 update

• Mahara preview version 19.10 RC1 is available. There is a long list of new features.
• See my presentation on the new feature highlights.
• One of the main changes: Edit page layout -> Moved to Gridstack -> There are bound to be some things that we need to fix up.
• Conversion of pages will happen when they are edited but not during the time of the upgrade, which will help not to bloat the upgrade.
• Triggers were also removed.
  • Question: Were only Elasticsearch triggers removed? No, triggers for notifications and quota as well besides Elasticsearch. These were all the triggers that Mahara had.
  • The function to add triggers is still there if someone required it.
  • Testing the trigger removal is difficult. For Elasticsearch, for example, you would need to ensure that things that are queued before the upgrade are still queued after the upgrade.
• Release date? Last week of October 2019; RC2 before then.
• Security updates at the same time; currently 2 public security issues: Marked and Simplesamlphp libraries.
• Do themes have to be redeveloped? No. We are still using Bootstrap 4. A number of small updates have been made though to account for changes and issues that had been discovered in particular during 19.04 testing and now during the release candidate stage
• Please test to help make it a better 19.10.0 release.

Guillaume's projects

Recommender system

• Created a plugin for his Master's thesis:
  • Library of publications (reusing some of the file upload functionality) that can be downloaded by students in a group.
  • Students can review and rate them.
  • There is a recommender system that recommends other publications based on student's previous ratings.
• There were instructions on setting up an artefact plugin. That was simple, but there were no instructions on setting up interactions. He modelled it after the plan artefact. That was a good idea as it's one of the newer ones.
• He couldn't determine whether the way he wrote the interactions was an older way or whether there is something better.
• As part of the thesis, he wrote quite a bit of documentation and is happy to share that. Would like to have it reviewed first though before putting on the wiki.
• Used Docker with 3 containers: Web server, DB, PHP runtime
• Idea: Put in another container that gives runtime specifically for the recommender system when there is more calculation power needed. Right now it's coded right in PHP. But if there is a larger site, something else may be needed.
• Suggestion from Ghada: Add a mail catcher to a container to capture all the emails:

 add to docker-compose.yml: 
 mailhog:
 image: "mailhog/mailhog"
 ports:
 - "1025:1025"
 - "8025:8025" 

under the services section

Social network

• Guillaume works with amateur orchestra in London. Will use Mahara as intranet backbone so musicians can organise themselves and build a community of practice based on their sections in the orchestra, but also for the entire orchestra.
• Interested in functionality to converge on a date that works for everyone (something like Doodle and also calendar functionality.
• Will report back when the idea has progressed a bit more.

Next meeting

On 9 December 2019 at 7 UTC.

• Chair: Rebecca Blundell
• Minute taker: Robert Lyon

To do

• Guillaume: Share plugin documentation with the Catalyst team for review. Best to send it to [email protected].
• Kristina: Ask Cecilia what happens during export when page hasn't been converted yet. Answer: Pages with old layout are exported as before. See the commit
• Catalyst: To look into web conferencing tool to avoid the issues we had this time.