Hi everyone,

Firstly, the bad news - we're still fixing bugs on Mahara 1.1, so the release is going to be delayed a little while longer. There are a lot of nuances around the view copying behaviour that are important to get right, which Richard Mansfield has been working hard on. We will keep releasing regular betas as things improve.

The good news is, the new mahara.org site is getting close to being ready. A big change since the last update is that we have decided to use Mahara itself for mahara.org, which will be an interesting experiment in itself! There have been a few new features added to Mahara as a result - for example, groups can now be made public, so that the outside world can see them (including their forums), and the ability to mark forums as ones that users should automatically be subscribed to has been added.

A disadvantage of this is that no user accounts will be migrated to the new site, but we feel this is OK because there's not much you can do on the current site other than post in the forums. We intend to spider the forums just before the changeover and keep static copies of the old forum discussions around at the correct URLs for a while, so that Google is not unhappy with us :)

On the other hand, it will be great to see people sign up to mahara.org and make their own portfolios, hopefully regarding Mahara of course! And all this use of Mahara should hopefully give us ideas on how Mahara itself can be improved to more easily support working like a community website.

Once again, sorry about the delay to Mahara 1.1 - it turns out I'm not very good at estimating. But we're working as fast as we can, and hopefully it can be released before too long.