Site administration -> Extensions
Extensions in Mahara serve to provide certain functionality in the system. Extensions can be installed at any point and also be hidden.
Site 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.
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.
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 connected to 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 any where 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 is unlikely to significantly increase search performance.
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.
Configure the internal search plugin
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
Site 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.
HTML Purifier now has the SafeIframe feature and this is implemented in Mahara as well. This feature allows you to specify the base URLs for media that you want your users to embed. These iFrames are then considered safe and will not be stripped out of a text box or journal entry where you can use them. You do not have to write a bespoke filter for using these iFrame sources.
Note
An admin interface for adding, editing and deleting these iFrame sources will be added in the next version of Mahara.
The following instructions can only be carried out by an administrator who has access to the server on which your Mahara site is housed.
Code extract with the standard safe iFrame sources