En/Release Notes/0.9.0alpha2

Released: 16 November 2007

*** THERE IS NO UPGRADE PATH TO THIS RELEASE ***

You MUST install this from scratch, upgrading from trunk or from 0.8 stable is NOT supported.

This is a preview release of Mahara 0.9 Accio. Things will be broken! Please do not file bug reports, but we are interested to hear your feedback on the new features, through #mahara on freenode, e-mail to dev@mahara.org or the forums on eduforge.

This release includes:

• New blocktypes for the views framework:
  • Entire blog
  • Single blog post
  • Recent posts from one or more blogs
  • RSS/Atom feeds
  • Files to download from files section
  • Image from files section
  • Videos/MP3s/flash etc. from files section
  • Video from Youtube/Google video
  • Profile information
  • Contact information
  • Resume field
  • Entire resume
• Various bug fixes and improvements
• NO ponies. Sorry!

Other notes:

• The "public views" setting in the site options page now works - it defaults to off, so switch it on if you want public views
• The database type for mysql has changed from 'mysql' to 'mysql5' in the config file. 'mysql' will continue to work for a short while longer, but you should change your setting to 'mysql5' as soon as you can.
• How images are cached on disk has been changed to be more scalable. This has resulted in much more lenient limits on image sizes, and improved image resizing quality. The old image cache will be cleared - which might be a good thing, as the bad quality resized images will be removed.

As mentioned, there is no supported upgrade path. Attempting to upgrade an existing Mahara will result in a broken system, so do not try this yet.