3. Dashboard — Mahara 19.

10 manual

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Table of Contents

3. Dashboard
3.1. Login
3.2. Login with strict privacy
3.3. Overview
3.4. Navigation
3.4.1. Main menu navigation
3.4.2. Administration menu navigation
3.4.3. User menu navigation
3.5. Quick links
3.6. User-specific information
3.7. Footer

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3. Dashboard

3.1. Login
You always need a login to authenticate yourself and access your personal information, portfolio pages and
groups that you belong to. You can log in on the Mahara homepage.

Login form

1. Username: Type your username in this field (not for SSO or Moodle accounts).
2. Password: Provide your password. If you enter your password incorrectly 5 times in a row during one
session, access is locked for 5 minutes before you can try again.
3. Click the Login button to access your account.
4. Lost username / password: If you do not remember your username or password to your account,

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click this link to be taken to a page where you can request an email with your details. It will contain
your username and a link to change your password.
5. Register: If you do not have an account, and your institution allows self-registration for an account,
use this link and follow the instructions on the next page.
6. SSO login: If you log in via your institution’s SSO (single sign-on) account, please use this button to
be taken to the SSO login.

  The regular login form is only available for internal and LDAP accounts. Internal accounts are
accounts for which you registered through your Mahara site or that were created by
administrators either manually, or by a CSV file upload.

The “Lost username / password” link only works for internal accounts where you use the
regular login form.

If you log in via SSO or Moodle for example, you must retrieve your password directly from
these services. If you do not know how to do that, please ask your administrator.

You only see the SSO buttons if SSO has been been enabled on your site for at least one
institution.

You can hide the login form entirely from the homepage if your Mahara instance generally only connects to
an external authentication method such as MNet or CAS. In these cases, your users will need to log in via
a different site and seeing the login form on the homepage may only be confusing.

Once you have hidden the login form, only a link to it is displayed on the homepage for an administrator to
log into the site.

Link to the login form

After you successfully logged in to Mahara, you see your Dashboard. This is your homepage where you
can see the latest activity of you and other users on Mahara. You can customise the dashboard so that you

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always see the items that are most important to you.

Only you can see your dashboard. Nobody else has access to it.

3.2. Login with strict privacy

When the site administrator turned on strict privacy, you need to consent to the terms and conditions and
the privacy statement of the site and maybe even an institution if you are a member of an institution before
you can enter your account. If you don’t, you have the opportunity to discuss your issues with them with an
administrator.

  When any of the statements changed, you will be presented with them again and need to
make a decision about consenting or not.

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Accept legal statements upon first login

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1. Title of the legal statement.

  There can be up to 4 statements that you may need to consent to. This depends on the
setup of the site that you use.

2. Click the Retractable icon  to close this section. This is helpful if the texts are very long.
3. The date the statement was last updated is displayed.
4. The text of the statement.
5. If you consent to the statement, flip the switch to “Yes”.

  Before you consent to a statement, please read it carefully. If you do not understand a
section or have questions, do not consent to it but leave it set to “No”. When you save
your changes, you will have the opportunity to detail why you do not consent and get in
touch with the administrator to discuss your concern.

6. Click the Save changes button to accept your decisions.

3.3. Overview
You can change certain aspects of your dashboard, namely the user-specific information, but a lot of what
you see is static to allow you to quickly access other parts of Mahara.

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Your homepage is your dashboard from which you can access a number of areas in Mahara
conveniently.

1. Search: Search for users who have an account to view their profile page and check which pages they
have made accessible to you. If your site has fulltext search available, you can search for anything on
the site using this search box.

  In the User search box you can most often search for users’ display name. Depending
on the settings that the site administrator made, you may also be able to search for
users’ real name and username. If the site administrator allowed users to hide their real

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name, you can do so in your general account options.

To provide you with the most relevant search results, you automatically search only for
users within your own institution, but can choose to search for everyone on your Mahara
installation on the “People” page you are taken to.

If the site administrator turned on exact user search, you need to provide the correct
display name or real name in order to find another user.

2. Inbox: Click the Inbox icon  to view all your notifications and send messages.
3. User menu: Click the User menu navigation icon  to reach your account settings, profile, profile
pictures, legal statements, connected apps, notification settings, and the logout link, or click your
profile picture to be taken to your profile page.
4. Main menu: Use the Main menu navigation icon  to navigate to other areas of your portfolio.

  Administrators and staff who have access to the administration area, see the
Administration menu navigation icon  in addition to the main menu navigation so
they can navigate within the administration area.

5. Quick links: These quick links take you directly to certain areas of Mahara.
6. Edit dashboard: The Edit dashboard button allows you to jump directly into the edit screen for your
dashboard without having to go to Main menu → Create → Pages and Collections first.

  You cannot add a skin to your dashboard page.

7. User-specific information: You can customise this area on your dashboard to put blocks there that
you want to see every time you log in.
8. Personal information: This sidebar block contains static and dynamic information:

Your name is linked to your profile page.

Your profile picture is linked to your profile pictures page for easy uploading of new profile
pictures.
If you are a member of any groups, they are displayed here.
Pending friend requests and group invitations are displayed.

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If you tagged artefacts or pages with the tag “profile”, a link to them is placed here.
9. Online users: If this sidebar block is enabled, you see users who have been logged in during the last
10 minutes. Depending on the settings for your institution that the administrator chose, you may see
all users, only users from your institution(s) or no users at all.
10. Profile completion: You see this sidebar block if your site or institution administrators turned on the
profile completion functionality.
11. Links and resources: List of links to websites or documents that are visible to all logged-in users or
the public.

3.4. Navigation
The app-style like navigation makes it easy to distinguish between the main navigation menu, the user
menu, and the administration navigation.

3.4.1. Main menu navigation

The main menu is visible to all users and allows everyone to navigate to their content, portfolios, and
groups.

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The main menu is the same for everyone

1. Click the Main menu navigation icon  to see a drop-down menu with the available options.
2. Click one of the options to reach them. If there is another level of menu items, clicking the menu item
or the the Arrow down icon  will display these.
3. Click the title again or the Arrow up icon  to close the second level navigation.

  You can also click anywhere in the entire bar that surrounds the menu item to trigger an
action.

4. Click a sub menu item to be taken to the appropriate page.

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3.4.2. Administration menu navigation

If you have access to administration functionality, you see a second menu, the administration menu.

  Depending on your permissions, you may not see all menu items. The menu displayed here is
the one of the site administrator who can see everything in the administration menu. Staff and
institution administrators see a subset of these items.

The administration menu is only available to staff and administrators.

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1. Click the Administration menu navigation icon  to see a drop-down menu with the available
options.
2. Click one of the options to reach them. If there is another level of menu items, clicking the menu item
or the the Arrow down icon  will display these.
3. Click the title again or the Arrow up icon  to close the second level navigation.

  You can also click anywhere in the entire bar that surrounds the menu item to trigger an
action.

4. Click a sub menu item to be taken to the appropriate page.

3.4.3. User menu navigation

The user menu is visible to all users. It allows you to acces your account settings, inbox, and profile easily.

The user menu is available to all users

1. Click your profile picture to be taken to your profile page.

2. Click the Arrow down icon  in the user menu to see additional options.
3. Your name: Your name is displayed to indicate who is logged in esp. when viewing portfolio pages

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where the profile block is not visible. You can click on it to go to your profile page.

  If an administrator masquerades as another user, this name helps to check quickly, in

which account actions are undertaken.

4. Profile: Jump to the settings page of your profile where you can change vital basic information.
5. Profile pictures: Click this menu item to be taken to the page where you can manage your profile
pictures.
6. Settings: Top level navigation item that gives you access to more options. Click the text or the Arrow
down icon  to see the secondary navigation:

Settings: This link gives you access to your account settings and notifications
Legal: The legal texts, i.e. the privacy statement and the terms and conditions, are displayed
that you have either actively or implicitely agreed to.
Notifications: Change your notification preferences.
Apps: See which apps you have connected to your account.
7. Logout: Link to log out of your current session.

3.5. Quick links

When you log in to Mahara, you see three new boxes with quick links:

Create: Create your electronic portfolio in a flexible personal learning environment. This takes you to
Main menu → Create → Pages and collections.
Share: Share your achievements and development in a space you control. Clicking on this box takes
you to Main menu → Share → Shared by me.
Engage: Engage with other people in discussion forums and collaborate in groups. This takes you to
Main menu → Engage → Groups.

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Mahara usage information and information when you hover over a box with your cursor

With the help of these quick links you can reach the different parts of your portfolio directly from your
dashboard.

  If you removed these boxes from your dashboard but want to get them back at a later point,
you can re-active them under User menu → Settings → Preferences → Dashboard
information.

If you do not see the dashboard boxes and do not have the option to turn this setting on, your
site administrator disabled this feature in the site configuration.

3.6. User-specific information

The default dashboard includes the following blocks:

Latest changes I can view

My portfolios

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Inbox
Topics I’m following

These blocks are filled with content once you start using Mahara and create pages, receive messages from
other users, have access to others’ portfolio pages and use the forums for discussions. You can customize
these blocks to your liking by editing your dashboard. Click the Edit dashboard button
 Edit dashboard directly on your dashboard or go to Portfolio in the navigation menu, click the Edit

button  next to the dashboard page and change the blocks like you would change them on any page
in Mahara.

  Refer to the section “Add content to a page” for more information on adding and removing
blocks from a page.

The site administrator can change the default blocks on the dashboard page for new users in
Administration → Configure site → Pages.

3.7. Footer
The footer is displayed on every page. If you have a custom theme, you can also make changes to the
footer.

Links in the footer

The default footer in a Mahara site can have links to:

1. Legal: Terms and conditions and privacy statement(s). When a person is logged in, this page
displays the statements that they consented to. They can find that page also via User menu →
Settings → Legal.
2. About: A page that the site administrator can change via “Static pages”

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3. Contact us: A form for anyone on the site to contact the site administrator(s). A site administrator
may overwrite this form and point to a different page or even an email address in the menu
configuration.
4. Help: This is a link to the Mahara manual. The link goes to the corresponding page in the manual.
The correct version of the manual is selected automatically.

  The site administrator can decide in the configuration of the footer whether to display the links
“Legal”, “About us”, “Contact us”, and “Help”.

The Mahara manual is licensed under your choice of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 unported or GNU General Public License
version 3 or later 2011-2020 Catalyst IT and others.
Last updated on Apr 12, 2020.
Created using Sphinx 3.0.1.

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