As site and institution administrator you have an additional navigation item, Administration. When you click on it, your navigation changes completely to give you quick access to the administration of Mahara. Depending on your role as site or institution administrator, you may see the full administration (site administrators) or only a subset of it (institution administrators).
Top level navigation for a site administrator once inside Administration¶
Top level navigation for an institution administrator once inside Administration¶
After you have installed Mahara, you may see a number of warnings when you go to the Administration as site administrator. They should all be resolved to ensure that your site is secure and has all the necessary settings.
Session entropy length: Your PHP session.entropy_length setting is too small. Set it to at least 16 in your php.ini to ensure that generated session IDs are random and unpredictable enough. You can learn more about this advisory on the OWASP session management cheatsheet.
Noreply email address: If the system email address is empty or a malformed email address, you are asked to check and correct it in the system mail address setting.
Site-wide password salt: If you do not have one set, please edit your config.php file and set it to a reasonable length.
SAML setup: If you do not have SAML authentication set up properly and do not have SAML activated, you do not see any warning messages as they would only go away if you activate the plugin and install all the required dependencies.
As site administrator you can choose to register your Mahara site with mahara.org and help us compile a list of Mahara installations around the world to get a picture by how many people Mahara is used. Currently, this list is not published online. When you are on the administration overview page, you will see a link directly to the registration page.
You can preview the data that is sent. Sending weekly updates is recommended so that the information we have is up-to-date. All information is sent anonymously. We will only know, for example, which version of Mahara you are running, how many times blocks or artefacts have been used, how many users you have etc.
Register your Mahara site with the Mahara project¶
Data that will be sent: Click this panel to preview the data that will be sent from your site.
Send weekly updates: Set this switch to “Yes” if you wish so send regular updates about your site to the project. These updates are based on changes in your site and include only anonymous updates.
Click the Register button to finish your registration with the Mahara project or click Cancel to abort.
If you have problems with your Mahara instance and you request information from the community in the forums, this information, esp. about your version and the cron, are useful to have. Furthermore, the version number allows you to check that you have the latest security release of your Mahara version installed.
See also
The cron job is very important in Mahara as a number of vital tasks are only performed when it is running. You can find more information of how to set it up on the wiki. If the cron is not running or only partially running, that information is displayed in red.
The Content tab in the site statistics holds information about
artefacts
general site information
Statistics for the current week for all artefacts etc.¶
Name: The statistics item itself, e.g. artefact or other general item on site level. It is linked to the Historial data statistics for an overview of the changes over time.
Modified: This column shows the number of updates during the current week.
Total: This column shows the total number of instances of the items.
Export statistics in CSV format: Download the cumulative statistics about all the statistics shown for the week in a CSV file.
See also
If you wish to see the number of different blocks used in portfolios, please go to the institution statistics.
Note
The number of total content statistics will vary because only when an artefact or block was used will the statistics be created for that type.
The Historical data tab in the site statistics holds historical data over time about a particular content item that you have clicked on in the Content tab. Changes are saved per default on a weekly basis. However, whenever you run the cron manually, a new statistics will be created as well. You can also download the statistics as CSV file.
The Institutions tab in the site statistics holds cumulative data on basic institution statistics. The numbers reflect the amount of content institution members have created. You find the totals for:
members
pages
blocks
artefacts
forum posts
You can sort each column in the table by clicking on its heading and also download the statistics in a CSV file.
When you click a number, you will be taken to the Historical data statistics page for that item in the respective institution.
If your site allows users to be in more than one institution, their content will be counted twice as they are regarded as members in each institution. However, if looked at just the full site statistics where institutions do not play a role, there their content is only counted once.
The statistics about active institutions gives insight into how many members logged into Mahara during a particular time period and how many times logins were performed during that time period.
Reporting time period. The default setting is the previous calendar month.
Note
To alter the time period of the results you can add a start and an end option to the URL, e.g. admin/statistics.php?type=logins&start=2015-01-01&end=2015-04-30. This will return the results for the 4-month period of 1 January to 30 April 2015.
Institution: List of the institutions that are on the site.
Click the arrow to change the sort order of a column.
Logins: The number of logins during the time period for each individual institution.
Active users: The number of distinct users from the institution that used the site at any point during the reporting time period.
The number of institutions on the site.
These statistics can be downloaded as CSV file.
Note
All institutions are always included in the export no matter whether they are all shown on the screen or not.
A number of elements are cached in Mahara on the system level to speed up the site. In some cases, you may wish to force a new version though if the browser doesn’t recognize it on its own.
You may close the site to everyone except administrators. This is useful when you prepare for and complete a database upgrade. Only administrators will be able to log in until you either reopen the site or an upgrade is successfully completed.
