Book Image

Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Mahara 1.2 E-Portfolios: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Mahara is a user-centred environment with a permissions framework that enables different views of an e-portfolio to be easily managed. These views helps you display your artefacts – text files, spreadsheets, images, and videos – in a way you choose and to the people you want. You can also create online communities and social networks through groups, blogs, and forums.Being a novice, you will need a quick and easy implementation guide to set up your feature-rich digital portfolio.This book is your step-by-step guide to building an impressive professional e-portfolio using Mahara. It covers the key features of Mahara that will help you set up your customized digital portfolio and display the artefacts in your preferred way allowing contribution from selected users only.This book will introduce to the exciting features of Mahara framework and help you develop a feature-rich e-portfolio for yourself. You will see how easily you can create folders, upload multiple files like journals, project documents, pictures, and videos and share them with your friends. You will learn to set up views of these files, making these visible to your chosen friends only. And then, you will allow people to give their inputs.You will learn to create blogs and forums and get connected to the rest of the world. Customization and administration of your Mahara site will become easy after you have gone through this book. Imagine how good you will feel when you will see your knowledge, success, and ideas going live and available to your chosen audiences for their inputs.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mahara 1.2 ePortfolios
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

What will you need?


Before you can install Mahara, you will need to have access to a Linux server. It may be that you run Linux on a laptop or desktop at home or that your company or institution has its own Linux servers, in which case, great! If not, there are many hosting services available on the Internet, which will enable you to access a Linux server and therefore run Mahara.

It is important that you get a server to which you have root access. It is also important that you set your server up with the following features:

  • Database: Mahara must have a database to work. The databases supported are PostgreSQL Version 8.1 or later and MySQL Version 5.0.25 or later. The Mahara developers recommend that you use PostgreSQL, if possible, but for most installations, MySQL will work just as well.

  • PHP: Mahara requires PHP Version 5.1.3 or later.

  • Web Server: The preferred web server is Apache.

  • PHP extensions:

    • Compulsory Extensions: GD, JSON, cURL, libxml, SimpleXML, Session, pgSQL or Mysqli, EXIF, OpenSSL or XML-RCP (for networking support)

    • Optional Extension: Imagick

Ask your resident IT expert about the features listed above if you don't understand what they mean.

Note

A quick way to install some of the software listed above is to use the apt-get install command if you are using the Ubuntu/Debian Linux systems. See http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/apt-howto/ to find out more.