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

Time for action - creating the config.php file


  1. 1. In the htdocs folder of your Mahara site you will find a file called config-dist.php. Use the nano command in your terminal to start editing config-dist.php file.

nano config-dist.php

Note

Other Linux people use much more sophisticated text editors like Vim (http://www.vim.org/) and Emacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/). We are simple folk and are perfectly happy with nano: http://www.nano-editor.org/.

  1. 2. You will now see the file open on the command line. Use the arrow keys on your keyboard to scroll up and down the page until you get to a section called database connection details. In the following example the user is using mysql5, rather than PostgreSQL. Fill in the information so that it matches the details you used to set up your own database:

  1. 3. Next, continue scrolling down the file until you reach a line that starts with $cfg->dataroot. Here, you must fill in the full path from the server root directory to the data directory we created earlier in this chapter.

  1. 4. Congratulations, you've now finished editing the configuration file. Save it by clicking Ctrl + C on your keyboard. When asked if you would like to rename the file, type Y for yes and name the file config.php.

What Just Happened?

What we just did was very important, we let Mahara know where the database is and the password needed to access it. We also let it know the location of the dataroot directory.