Mahara - ePortfolios for LMSs

[atrilahiji]

Can integrate with Moodle and useful for online learning.

https://mahara.org/
https://github.com/MaharaProject/mahara/tree/20.10_STABLE

[jdaviescoates]

It's so great having you here @atrilahiji - I can't wait to have a full suite of online learning tools to work with on Cloudron!

[atrilahiji]

@jdaviescoates I'm very into online learning so I can pull things I come across in my day job to here to hopefully make Cloudron a viable platform for easily spinning up an online learning ecosystem. What I love is that you don't have to be overly experienced with server management and reverse proxy shit to use it. Which is good for people like me. I am a developer but that doesn't mean I have a good grasp over sysadmin stuff

[marcusquinn]

I can see someone doing a Cloudron University

[atrilahiji]

@marcusquinn Exactly! Perhaps for scalability reasons large universities would not (we use multiple app nodes behind a load balancer to handle our load) but perhaps for professional development within companies, career training businesses, or small community colleges.

[marcusquinn]

@atrilahiji Yeah, even if you need a high-availability stack, it's still super useful to framework an app quickly and cheaply here, then migrate the DB before launch if that was the necessary specs.

Although, my experience with K8S stacks is there's a lot of compromises for speed, and a single high-powered server with a good raid setup and backups & restore strategy can serve a hell of a lot of users reliably without the complexity.

Keep meaning to get around to testing Scaleway K8S, will do a thread on performance testing when I do.

[atrilahiji]

Im gonna try both this and Kaltura at some point this week. If there are any other Moodle integrations you’re interested in definitely throw more app requests up. I’m if I don’t pick them up I’m sure someone else can eventually.

[jdaviescoates]

@atrilahiji said in Mahara - ePortfolios for LMSs:

If there are any other Moodle integrations you’re interested in definitely throw more app requests up.

There are so many listed at https://moodle.org/plugins/ that it's hard to know what's out there!

Is there a list of the most popular/ recommended integrations somewhere?

Also, perhaps MoodleNet? I was just chatting with someone yesterday who want to run a series of online course and wants the participants to be able to chat and share resources with each other, and it looks like this was pretty much built for that?

[atrilahiji]

Initial commit is here: https://git.cloudron.io/AtriLahiji/mahara-app

It works but needs LDAP and SMTP (although we can probably get by without LDAP because it can integrate with Moodle and uses Moodle as an auth provider)

Edit: Added SMTP and its pretty stable

[atrilahiji]

I have my test environment up here: https://mahara.lahijiapps.dev/

[robi]

@atrilahiji said in Mahara - ePortfolios for LMSs:

I have my test environment up here: https://mahara.lahijiapps.dev/

FF doesn't like it:

Did Not Connect: Potential Security Issue

Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to mahara.lahijiapps.dev because this website requires a secure connection.

What can you do about it?

mahara.lahijiapps.dev has a security policy called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which means that Firefox can only connect to it securely. You can’t add an exception to visit this site.

The issue is most likely with the website, and there is nothing you can do to resolve it. You can notify the website’s administrator about the problem.

[atrilahiji]

Lol I took it down to test something. My bad lol

[robi]

[atrilahiji]

@robi Its back. Feel free to play around in there. I'm not using it for anything important.

[atrilahiji]

@girish I can't catch a break. This one seems to have the same clusterfuck of a plugin system as Moodle. Time to see if this is going to be any easier or if we will need to package this similar to Moodle. I'll see what I can do.

Edit: I am having regrets about requesting and then taking this one on but here we go!

[girish]

Out of curiosity, what exactly does ePortfolio mean?

[atrilahiji]

@girish they actually explain it quite well here: https://mahara.org/view/view.php?id=3

Heh thought I pasted it in on my phone but I guess not.

[atrilahiji]

Huh... the plugins that I can find are all either for version 1.4 (super old) or integrated into core. Tempted to just package it as read only without any plugin support.

[girish]

@atrilahiji Sounds like a plan!

[atrilahiji]

@girish Trying to get this sorted out but got a strange error on this branch when it does the initial install: https://git.cloudron.io/AtriLahiji/mahara-app/-/tree/wip-PLUGINS

Anyone have any idea what might be going on?

[atrilahiji]

Got it working with plugin support similar to the Moodle app: https://git.cloudron.io/AtriLahiji/mahara-app

EDIT: Fixed a couple of security issues (namely the lack of password salting)

EDIT 2: The only thing I notice now is some text flashing whenever the page reloads? O_O

[girish]

@atrilahiji said in Mahara - ePortfolios for LMSs:

EDIT 2: The only thing I notice now is some text flashing whenever the page reloads? O_O

Do you see this in their demo instance too?

[atrilahiji]

@girish Nope. Seems like its after I my MR where I moved everything to /app/data too

[atrilahiji]

The weird text popping up was me just completely not understanding PHP. Fixed it by just setting the salt and urlsecret in the start.sh as god intended.

https://git.cloudron.io/AtriLahiji/mahara-app

[atrilahiji]

Pushed a branch with SMTP set up. Emails still don't seem to be sending. Investigating...

[atrilahiji]

Wow nevermind. I had the settings in the config.php all along. It only didn't work because Mahara sends emails using the address on the user initiating the emails' account.

I need a screen break lol. I'm inventing tasks that have already been finished

[girish]

@atrilahiji said in Mahara - ePortfolios for LMSs:

It only didn't work because Mahara sends emails using the address on the user initiating the emails' account

Ah, for those apps, I guess we can just document saying they have disable From Address validation on the server.

[atrilahiji]

@girish Alright. Yeah for this one I can set the noreply address but it looks like for stuff like manually adding users, it uses the email of the one who invites. I made the admin user's default email the same as the from email for now.