Proposals

This section contains specifications that are currently in development.  Once they are finalised, they should be moved either into the Roadmap temporarily, until the new feature is released, and then into User documentation.

What might be coming to Mahara

The Mahara project does not have a set roadmap for each release as that depends largely on features that the community implements and those that are being funded to implement, e.g. via a Mahara support company. Nevertheless, the Mahara release team at Catalyst has some items that it wishes to take a closer look for upcoming releases. You can view these items in the table below.

The items are listed more or less according to priority. Some items are fairly small whereas others are large pieces of work that may need to be split up over several releases once the specifications are clearer. The effort that is displayed is just an indication as the eventual implementation may be larger or smaller depending on the finalized specifications.

The list was inspired by the existing Mahara wishlist and the Blue sky thinking.

If you wish to contribute to funding any of these features, please let us know.

Features	Comments	Projected effort
TinyMCE selector for choosing portfolio pages for linking them in the text		small
TinyMCE button for embedding iframes		small
Default skins		medium
Rethinking groupings of pages and collection	organisation for yourself as well as grouping of pages for others to see	huge
Reduce number of clicks	ongoing
Timeline / Page versioning	i.e. like a wiki so you can go back to previous versions of a page / entire portfolio; this is probably what is needed rather than implementing a wiki because a Mahara page could just be one page and doesn't have to consist of multiple columns	big to huge
Re-design of the page builder	(long-term) style changes, page itself as rich-text area and then drop blocks into that; make page layouts into a plugin type, i.e. have a traditional Mahara page, a blog page, etc.	huge
Etherpad functionality	i.e. editing text collaboratively simultaneously	medium
Make the end-rendered Mahara pages prettier so that they don't look so blocky		medium
“Like” button for pages		medium
"Copy page/collection" button for users without an account to create a Leap2A file
Skin previewer	Switch between skins and quickly preview your page with the skin	medium
journal entry prompts	to facilitate scaffolding	medium
Export pages and collections on all levels	i.e. group, institution, site and not only individual portfolio pages / collections	small
Forum posts by email	Moodle got it in 2.8	medium
AJAX preloading pages	i.e. make front-end faster
Config file generator	for easier way of setting up Mahara
Tag recommendations	tag recommendations based on what's on your page	big to huge
performance profiling	Nigel already started on that
More authentication plugins	see Janrain plugin; need to be able to limit e.g. GoogleApps domain (maybe)

 

Not done

• Resume enhancements
• Better RTL Support
• Cloud (a.k.a. Repository) Services exist as plugin
• Content Management System
• Email to Mahara
• External media block extension (partially in 1.6)
• Forum Badges
• Isolated Institutions
• Localised Icons and Buttons (partially implemented in 1.6)
• Metadata for views and artefacts
• More flexible use of profile information - partly implemented in More flexible use of profile information proposal2
• Multipage Views
• Multipage Views Take 2 (aka Collections)
• Multipage Views Take 3 (aka let a Page belong to multiple Collections)
• Navigation Revamp
• New Slideshow plugin
• Notification Feeds
• Objectionable content reporting
• Page layout plugin type
• Resume and CPD integration
• Scheduled Bulk Feedback
• Site Statistics Extension
• Tagging
  • Group Tags
  • Site and Institutional defined tags
• Timezone Support
• Tracking Outcomes
• Tracking Outcomes Functional Specification
• User Management Enhancement

Done

• Anti-spam (1.3)
• Clean URLs (1.6)
• Groups CSV Creation (1.5)
• Groups revamp (1.5)
• Improve Password Storage (1.5)
• More flexible use of profile information proposal 2 (1.5)
• Moving between SSO institutions (1.5)
• Search 1.1 (1.5)
• Sitemaps (1.5)
• Variable Envelope Return Path Mail Bounce Detection (1.6)
• HTML5 media player
• New user probation
• Accessibility
• LDAP user account expiry and deletion
• Portfolio Export Import
• Text box block attachments and inline images
• Acceptance testing
• Search 2.0 (fulltext search implemented via Elasticsearch)
• Re-designing the menu navigation (17.04)
• MNet service migration: Implementation of LTI for SSO (17.04)
• Moodle LTI integration
• Web services in core
• Integrate SAML SSO into Mahara (16.10)
• Print (to PDF) (17.04)
• Implement patternlab.io or something similar (style guide in 16.04)
• Improve tagging UI
• TinyMCE button to embed images from your portfolio
• Auto-select everywhere (where it could replace more cumbersome interfaces)
• Upload a site logo
• Mobile specific HTML tags, e.g. opens camera app
• More responsive and updated themes (16.04)
• Copy page button
• Drag and drop on mobile
• Sticky filters