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Submitted by tonyhursh on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 07:59.

I used Mahara for my four week summer course, which just wrapped up.

This was a graduate course for the students enrolled in our distance learning Ed.M program; almost all of them are working classroom teachers.

Among other things, the students were expected to construct a Mahara site related to the content area they teach. You can see the results if you like.

We're *extremely* happy with the way Mahara worked out. We used to do similar portfolio activities using straight HTML, but that was a nightmare in a four week course (you can't even really get them up to speed on HTML in that time, much less have them develop content).

Well done, Mahara crew!

‹ Embedding a google map Moodle versus Mahara HTML editor ›

Nice !

Submitted by lapierre88 on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 08:33.

Really nicely done, I've surfed through your students' pages : impressive.

Would be a great idea to have some screenshots of such projects and publish them in this website (if people agree), just to show what can be done with Mahara.

I bet your students enjoyed that a lot more than those who were playing with HTML

Wow, I'm impressed, there

Submitted by nigel on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 17:13.

Wow, I'm impressed, there are some really impressive views there. Furthermore, you did something we didn't even think of, and linked them together to make sites.

We're going to be relaunching mahara.org and yes, one of the things we want to do on the new site is show of demo views from people who have made them - would it be possible to use some of those as examples?

It would be interesting to hear more about how well Mahara worked for you, if there's anything that could be improved etc. Clearly your Mahara has seen good use, so you probably found some good areas for improvement.

Projects as examples

Submitted by tonyhursh on Fri, 07/18/2008 - 04:27.

Thanks, Nigel and lapierre!

Sure, you're welcome to link to them.

Off the top of my head, the things that would've been helpful for us are:

1) The ability to include a block in more than one view without manually duplicating it. That would've helped a lot with organizing the different views into a site (as it was, they had to recreate their contents block in every view). Not a show-stopper, thanks to copy and paste, but still time consuming if you have to update every view when the site contents changes. Maybe some sort of "existing artifacts" menu that lets you drag things you've already created into a new view? (and update them in one location...sort of like the way the resume fields work?)

2) The ability to use the WYSIWYG editor in image descriptions. I wanted them to provide an image credit with a link to the original source (in most cases, a Creative Commons-licensed image from Flickr). We were able to do this, but it required entering raw HTML. Better, or in addition to this, some sort of image/text combo block that allows an image to be directly associated with text. Several of them used charts, graphs, etc. that could've benefited from this feature. They wound up using a couple of workarounds (making separate image and text boxes, embedding an image from another server into a text box, etc).

Thanks for the feedback!

--
Tony Hursh
Technology Coordinator
Curriculum, Technology and Education Reform
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://cterport.ed.uiuc.edu
http://cterfile.ed.uiuc.edu/mahara/view/view.php?id=2

I think there might actually

Submitted by nigel on Fri, 07/18/2008 - 14:34.

I think there might actually be a better way to handle the multiple pages thing - by making views themselves have multiple page support.

Then there could be a blocktype for handling navigation - or it could just be part of the view "boilerplate".

Image descriptions are pulled from the files section at the moment. Maybe it would be a good idea to do what we do with the profile blocktype, and allow users to put a description in a wysiwyg box to override that on a per-block basis.

All good feedback - thanks a lot!

How did you create the custom themes?

Submitted by sgeggie on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 03:48.

Hi,

I'm very new to Mahara. I like the work done in the examples above. Can you point me to where I might learn more about creating custom themes (or at least changing the default theme).

Thanks,
Steve

themes

Submitted by penny on Fri, 08/01/2008 - 05:58.

Hi Steve,

There's not much documentation about themes, but I hope this helps you (and if you create a new theme, updating the wiki with instructions would be amazing! ;) )

Mahara uses the smarty templating system for themes. Generally the location of the templates matches pretty well the paths to the php files calling them.

The themes are cascading, that is, you just need to make a new theme directory and override just the templates you want to change, you don't have to make a whole new theme.

The way to do is create htdocs/theme/yourtheme/ and make sure you make a config.php there (copy the default one) - the theme will inherit from the default theme by default. Then just copy any templates you want to change in there (make sure to use templates/ and static/ directories - not just putting files in yourtheme/ directly) and change the theme in the admin section (you probably are missing the way to set it because currently there is only one).

If you just want to change the stylesheet, just make htdocscss/style.css (and whatever others you want) and change that, you don't actually need to override smarty templates, although that is much more powerful once you get the hang of it.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for sharing these

Submitted by jennyp on Wed, 08/20/2008 - 02:28.

Hi Tony,
Thanks for sharing your work here & thanks for including the assessment guidelines also - always helpful to see how the balance between creative and "your own work" is explained.

A question for you from a novice. With that site contents block, I can see that you had to replicate the block in each page. Was each page created as a separate view by the students - so they would have had a "Home" view as the front page, then made a new view page for each?

Thanks,
Jenny