Administration → Extensions
Note
Extensions is only accessible by site administrators.
Extensions in Mahara serve to provide certain functionality in the system. Extensions can be installed at any point and can also be hidden.
Administration → Extensions → Plugin administration
The Plugin administration lists all the plugins that are currently installed on your Mahara instance and provides a link to the plugin configuration settings where available.
Plugins in Mahara are always installed and can be accessed if users know the URLs and would otherwise have access. Rather than enabling and disabling the functionality, plugins are hidden or made visible by clicking on the hide or show links beside the plugins. When hiding an artefact type plugin, Mahara stops the display of the blocks related to it.
Warning when a plugin is not yet installed
If you added a plugin to your site, you will need to go through its installation. A plugin that is not yet fully installed is marked with a warning. Click the Install link to start the installation process.
In order to delete a plugin completely, you must delete the code and all database tables that pertain to the plugin.
Note
Core Mahara functionality can be made unavailable to users by hiding it. This may be useful if you connect Mahara to another system that already provides this functionality or if you do not wish your users to use that functionality. However, the decision about hiding a functionality should be considered thoroughly as it may also mean that users may not be able to have as many artefacts available to them as they should have.
In the following, only the plugins that have additional settings are discussed.
You can provide additional image gallery settings and also allow your users to make Flickr and Photobucket image galleries available. The settings you make on this page will be the default settings for all users.
Configure the Image gallery block
Configure which file types users can embed into the Embedded media block. If you disable a file type that has already been used in a block, it will not be rendered any more.
Mahara comes with Flowplayer, a media player that can play FLV, MP4 (in H.264 format) and MP3 files. Videos are embedded and audio files played with the help of this player.
Other video file types can be enabled, but users must have the appropriate software installed on their computers and the respective plugin enabled in their browsers to play them.
Configure the Embedded media block
Note
If you allow the embedding of file types that cannot be played by Flowplayer, some users may not have the necessary software installed for displaying these file types.
You can limit the number of characters that are allowed for wall posts in this configuration setting. Existing posts will not be changed.
Configure wall settings
Turn comment ratings on to enable 5-star ratings in the feedback section on artefacts and pages.
Note
Ratings cannot be on their own and require either a comment or a file attachment.
Enable comment ratings
You can configure a variety of options for uploading files.
Configure the file plugin
For profile information you can decide which fields a user must provide when a user account is created manually or via CSV file. These fields are marked mandatory fields.
The profile fields marked searchable fields are available for all logged-in users to search on.
Choose mandatory and searchable profile fields
If you wish to use SAML authentication anywhere on your site, you must provide the path to your SAML php file in these settings.
Prepare your site for SAML authentication
If your site has a lot of users and uses a PostgreSQL database, user searches will be faster with exact user searching enabled. The setting will still work with MySQL databases, but it is unlikely that it increases search performance significantly.
The advantage of the exact user search is that if you have 20 users with the first name “Percy” but different last names, you may find the user you are looking for more quickly because you can search for “Percy Pearle” and the result list will not show “Percy Pearl”, “Percy Sutter”, “Percy Townsend” etc.
However, partial matches on profile fields will not return results, so if for example you have a user called “Percy”, then typing “Perc” into the search box will not find that user anymore.
Configure the internal search plugin
The regular Mahara search is limited to finding users and in certain places titles, descriptions and tags of pages or collections. However, Mahara can be extended to use allow for fulltext search capabilities. The Mahara core project team chose to use Elasticsearch. This is a powerful and extensible fulltext search engine. It does require a Java server, e.g. Tomcat, to run and thus may not be available for small instances of Mahara.
Note
Currently, the plugin can only be used for Mahara instances running on a PostgreSQL database. Work is in progress to extend the support for MySQL for Mahara 1.9.
Configure the Elasticsearch plugin
See also
You can find more information about Elasticsearch in Mahara on the wiki. There are also some developer notes to get you started.
The post delay setting determines the time (in minutes) that users have for editing their forum posts before they are mailed out. Once a forum post has been mailed and further edits are made, the date, time and editor are mentioned in the post.
Set the edit time before the forum post is finalised
Administration → Extensions → HTML filters
Mahara uses HTML Purifier to filter out malicious code that could threaten the security of the system. If you have code, e.g. iFrames or JavaScript that you wish to use and that otherwise gets filtered out, you will have to write a filter to circumvent that. Filters should always be specific to their purpose and not give ‘carte blanche’ to ensure security as much as possible.
Mahara already comes with a number of installed filters. Others can be uploaded and then installed. If you have created a new set of HTML filters, you can install them by unzipping the files into the folder /htdocs/lib/htmlpurifiercustom and then click the Install button.
Custom filters for iFrames that allow the embedding of media content such as YouTube and WikiEducator allow users to grab the URL of the page on which the media is displayed instead of having to find the actual embed code.
Note
You do not necessarily require bespoke filters for media that you wish to embed via <iframe> embed code. If you are happy to use the original embed code, you can add it to the list of allowed iframe sources.
If you wish to be able to paste the URL instead (like for a YouTube video), then you would need a bespoke filter.
Administration → Extensions → Allowed iframe sources
This feature allows you as site administrator to specify the base URLs for media that you want your users to be able to embed. These iframes are then considered safe and will not be stripped out of a text box, the external media block or a journal entry where you can use them. You do not have to write bespoke filters for using these iframe sources.
The administrator interface allows you to add and manage these sources easily. Mahara already comes with a number of built-in iframe sources that you can take as examples.
Add and edit allowed iframe sources
Note
Some sites can be reached via a variety of URLs, e.g. GoogleApps, Glogster. You need to provide all possible base URLs to ensure that the iFrames are displayed. If you give the individual sites of one provider the same name, it will only show up once in the list of iFrame sources in the external media block and not clutter the space unnecessarily.
See also
Community members started to collect iFrame sources that they are using on their sites to share which URLs would need to be provided to get the iFrames to work. You can check out the list on the wiki and also add your own iFrame sources there.
Administration → Extensions → Clean URLs
You can configure your site to use human-readable URLs for user profiles, groups and (group) portfolio pages. For example:
This option allows you to create more memorable URLs.
See also
Please follow the configuration instructions on the wiki for enabling this feature on your site. You need access to the server to do so.
In the administration area you can generate clean URLs for existing users, groups and pages. This is handy when you upgraded from an earlier version of Mahara or want to reset all custom URLs.
Regenerate clean URLs for existing users in bulk
Warning
If you generate clean URLs for all users from here, those who have already changed their URLs will lose their changes and links will be broken. We recommend you use this feature only when upgrading your Mahara site or when things have gone wrong with the clean URL generation.