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

Creating the database


A lot of the information created in your Mahara will be stored in a database. Mahara offers support for both PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. However we prefer to use PostgreSQL. If you are interested, see http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=302 for a discussion on why PostgreSQL is preferred to MySQL.

The way you create your database will depend on who you have chosen to host your Mahara. Sometimes, your web host will provide a graphical user interface to access your server database. Get in touch with your local IT expert to find out how to do this.

However, for smaller Mahara installations, we often prefer to use something like phpPgAdmin, which is a software application that allows you to manage PostgreSQL databases over the Internet. See http://phppgadmin.sourceforge.net for more information on setting up phpPgAdmin on your server.

Also see http://www.phpmyadmin.net/, for phpMyAdmin which works in a very similar way to phpPgAdmin but operates on a MySQL database.

For now, let's get on with creating a Postgres database using our phpPgAdmin panel.