Elias Tzoc blog!

Miami University Libraries launched a new website in August 2009 –and as part of the “web-design consistency” idea, we recently adapted the new look-and-feel to the Scholarly Commons project.  After all, consistency “makes sense” and it makes sites easier to use …in part because visitors don’t have to learn new tricks as they move around.

Anyway, the real work required some extra hours of -fun- editing/testing.  The power of CSS for web presentation was evident; I’d say that about 90% of the new look is purely based on CSS rules.  Getting the right DIV dimensions, font attributes was part of the challenge too, and that’s where 2 FireFox add-ons became extremely useful. ColorZilla is great color picker tool and Firebug is the perfect search/find tool for those unique DSpace DIV elements.

Of course, there were a couple of XSLT tricks as well.  For instance, DSpace -by default- displays 2 search boxes on the front page –not sure why?  But we only needed one, the challenge was how to remove/hide the search box on the <div id=”ds-body”> section …this was one required some extra searching/reading.  To make a long story short, the trick was to add a line of code in the theme.xsl file, restart tomcat and done!

<xsl:template match="dri:div[@n='front-page-search']">&#160;</xsl:template>

The last part of the work was the easiest one, just zip the new theme folder and send to OhioLINK, they replaced the old theme folder and bingo!

…now, in order to be -really- consistent, we should probably start thinking about another “re-design” …this time, for the Digital Collections website –oh well, that’s part of the to-do list already.

Quick note:

To give users the option of either password or LDPA login, add this line to the dspace.cfg file (look for Stackable Authentication Methods around line 294)

org.dspace.authenticate.LDAPAuthentication

We currently use DSpace for the Scholarly Commons project -hosted at the OhioLINK DRC-, and we plan to add other non-text collections in the future.  For the web interface, we’re using Manakin –which enables communities and collections to establish a unique look and feel.

A basic check list for setting up a theme for a collection/community:
1. Get the collection/community’s handle (e.g. 123456789/1)
2. Install the new theme (details can be found on this page)
3. Locate and edit the xmlui.xconf file (found in your DSpace config directory)
4. Restart Tomcat and done!

<this image may illustrate the memo>

Being able to customize the look and feel at the collection/community level, will become essential for a digital repository with different types of digital content (e.g. text, images, moving images, etc).

…after a couple of hours of work (test), now I can see some progress on a WordPress theme re-design.  It was originally a blueberry theme, but now -after all the changes and lines UNintentionally deleted- it doesn’t really look like a blueberry anymore …but it may be close to what I initially had  in mind, …will let you judge!