Developer Area/Developer Meetings/Core Developer Applications/Ghada El-Zoghbi

It would be a great pleasure if you would accept my application to the Mahara core team.

Who: Ghada El-Zoghbi

Where: Catalyst IT – Sydney

What: Senior Developer

Date of application: 21 March 2014

How

I've been working with PHP/MySql/PostGres/Apache for over 10 years and with Catalyst for the past 7 months.

I've been involved with Mahara while at Catalyst:

A major piece of work was to upgrade a Mahara site from 1.4 to 1.8. That instance of Mahara was heavily customised with changes to core files. I performed the following:
- Pulled out customisations from core files and created new artefacts. Such as:
  - artefact/event: maintain and publish events
  - aretefact/commentlike: implement a 'like' on a page.
  - aretefact/loggedoutgroup: display some data about groups to logged out users.
  - artefact/mentoring: setup a user's mentor status/details.
  - artefact/poll: maintain polls and allow users to create polls on their pages.
  - artefact/standard: implement Principals Standards.
  - artefact/reporting: implement extra reports.
  - breadcrumbs
  - etc...
- Modified the code to bring it up to security standard:
  - remove direct reference to $_POST and $_REQUEST variables and instead use standard Mahara functionality (i.e. param_alpha, param_integer, etc).
  - Use Mahar's 'safe_require' instead of PHP's 'require'.
Contributed enhancements to core Mahara code:
- Implement Elasticsearch with MySql (Bug#1237198)
- In Elasticsearch, set the second column to sort by score (Bug#1247729)
- Notify administrators if institutional membership is full. (Bug#1204699)
Fixed bugs in core Mahara code:
- Elasticsearch doesn't find media in a group (Bug#1237177)
- Report objectionable material with no message doesn't get sent to admin with digest emails. (Bug#1075760)
Contributed to testing by logging bugs when found and with possible solutions.

I've also attended: