Upload users in Mahara

Today, I am working on setting up our pilot Mahara instance.  I have 30-40 seminar students who will be starting out with Mahara as a means of creating a digital portfolio suitable for supporting applications for post-graduate work in the allied health fields.

Mahara does allow for csv upload, so I struggled for a while getting my file in shape.  The required fields are:

username,password,email,firstname,lastname,studentid

First, I had to pull the rosters from our student management system.  The data was not in the correct format, so I worked on that in a spreadsheet for awhile!

Then I checked it in notepad, since I have seen numerous extra commas and spaces magically appear where I did not want them.  And there were MANY extra commas and spaces that had to be cleaned up.

Even though we use LDAP for authentication, a password is required for the csv file. From the mahara user guide:

Your password must be at least six characters long and contain at least one digit and two letters. Your password may not be the same as your username and is case sensitive.

Eventually, I wrestled the file into the correct format, and the import was successful.  Now I need to work on creating some sample views.