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What’s new in Mahara 26.04?

12 May 2026, 9:45 AM

Mahara is a flexible portfolio platform that helps learners deepen their connection to learning. The latest release builds on what already works, with improvements across the experience for learners, educators, and administrators.

At the end of April 2026, the Mahara project team released Mahara 26.04. Every change in this release had a conversation behind it, shaped by a comprehensive usability review informed by community members' feedback, insight, and ideas. This release was made possible thanks to the organisations with active subscriptions, additional funding, and direct contributions by community members. Thank you to everyone involved in shaping Mahara 26.04.

Visit the release announcement for the full list of contributors. 

Watch the highlights of Mahara 26.04

Almost 20 years ago, Mahara began as a portfolio platform to give students space to document and reflect on their learning. Since then, it has grown into a flexible solution for all kinds of portfolios. Mahara is now used for personal reflective portfolios, assessment portfolios, and showcase portfolios used for job applications. It also supports professional certifications. This flexibility had increased its complexity. With 26.04, our team turned that complexity into an opportunity and conducted a comprehensive usability review.

The result? Mahara looks and feels modern and instantly familiar. It uses interaction elements found in other popular web applications. This means learners can get started quickly and with confidence. Often-used areas are highlighted in the new navigation and readily accessible at all times, reducing the number of clicks in many workflows.

As part of rethinking what Mahara looks like, accessibility was at the forefront of the changes to better support neurodiverse learners and those with various cognitive abilities. Here's what those changes mean in practice.

For learners: More time creating connections

Create portfolio pages easily: The most commonly used content types are now just one click away in a toolbar, and several page-building elements were merged to reduce the number of options. This reduces the learning curve for those new to Mahara and speeds up the workflow for experienced portfolio authors.

Stay in the flow: Adding a new page within a collection of pages has gotten much easier: Learners can add new pages while they are editing a portfolio.

Directly capture evidence of practice or competency: Record audio and video directly within a portfolio page. For anyone documenting clinical skills, vocational practice, or reflective learning, this means reflection can happen closer to the experience without needing to type.

Mahara dashboard

For administrators: Simplify workflows

Administrators benefit from workflow improvements that reduce the need for workarounds, in particular when managing accounts and competency frameworks.

Mahara SmartEvidence in Mahara 26.04. A table displays, the CV, internship, CPD, and tracks the progress Merge duplicate accounts cleanly: Move content across directly without manual exporting and importing of portfolios.

Create and manage competency frameworks: On a multi-tenanted site, institution administrators can directly create and update active SmartEvidence frameworks without needing the support from a site administrator. This gives them more control over the content they provide to their learners.

I love the new look and it's much cleaner than the way it was. I'm also excited that SmartEvidence is available on the institution level because you don't need to get the site administrator involved.

- Education Designer

Experience Mahara 26.04 for yourself

If you have an active subscription to Mahara, you can upgrade to Mahara 26.04 today. To see the new features in action or discuss how Mahara could work for your organisation, book a session with our team.

Frequently asked questions

Mahara 26.04 was released on 30 April 2026 and is available to all organisations that have an active subscription. You can install the latest release yourself, or ask your Mahara technical support company to upgrade your site.

The latest release of Mahara looks different to improve the experience, based on community feedback and a review of the portfolio platform.

You can use audio and video recording on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.

This is not recommended. All themes have been completely re-written for Mahara 26.04 and built using standard Bootstrap components wherever possible. You can create your custom theme, using one of the built-in ones as basis. A theming guide is available.

Existing SmartEvidence frameworks version 1 can be updated while they are active for small adjustments that do not impact assessment guidelines.

Your journal entries are still in your portfolio. The journal sections have been merged making it easier to manage how you want to display entries in your portfolio.

Mahara upgrade support

If you have any questions about the latest release or how we can best support you and your learning community, our Mahara team can help.

Contact us

Mahara resources

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Further reading

red, yellow, blue and white cubes on a dark blue background

Digital ethics in ePortfolios: Protecting student data

Mahara portfolio can be used for learning, assessment, showcase, work-integrated and professional certification

Top 10 benefits of ePortfolios