Developer Area/Local customizations

Mahara includes a /local directory. This is a central place which provides hooks for several types of local customizations, that allow a Mahara site to change the behavior of Mahara without editing Mahara core code.

Why /local?

If you're new to website administration, you may be asking, why bother? If I want to make a customization to my Mahara site, why not just edit the Mahara code directly?

The answer is that editing Mahara core code makes updates difficult. The Mahara project regularly releases updates, some quite large. If you've customized a particular file, and our updates change that file, you will either have to lose your updates or figure out how to apply them to the new version of the file. Using proper revision control, especially git, can make this process easier, but it's still easiest to avoid it by minimizing changes to the Mahara core code.

There are several ways to customize Mahara without touching core code. See Customising for the full list.