The last two weeks we were working on getting the OAI server for Greenstone 3 to validate against the on-line official OAI validation tool. There seemed to have been some code and configuration changes since the previous time the validation had been successful. Most of the changes were straightforward, though it took a while to work out what the OAI XML element in the build- and collectionConfig.xml files ought to be to set up an old demonstration collection for OAI (newly built collections have the element included by default). The final problem preventing validation had to do with how the earliestDatestamp for the repository was worked out and what the Datestamps for each document in a collection were. After fixing all the errors we had when trying to validate the GS3 OAI server, we finally succeeded in getting it to pass all the tests.

Work continues to go well on Greenstone 3. The new skin is looking really good and  – apart from a few small design decisions that have yet to be made – it is nearing completion. Currently what we have done is linked together the table of contents and the document so that when you close up a section in the table of contents it is also closed in the document (and visa versa), allowing you to more easily find the information you want, as well as providing a better overview as to what the document contains and how large it is.

One design decision we are currently contemplating is what to do with sections that contain other sections AND text of their own. For example, imagine a book has a chapter called Dogs, which has a section called Jack Russell. Lets say that the Dogs chapter has some text at the start of it describing dogs in general before moving on to specific types. If someone wants to collapse the Dog chapter they can simply click the – next to the Dog chapter in the table of contents, or if they want to collapse the Jack Russell chapter they can simply click the – next to the Jack Russell section. Doing it this way however does not allow the user to collapse just the text at the start of the Dog chapter, so this text will be there regardless of which section in the Dogs chapter they want to focus on, which is not ideal, especially if it is a long description.

The example above and other such design decisions are what we are currently working on solving, so that the new skin can be as easy and intuitive as possible.

Welcome to another late entry of my blog about Greenstone development. Early last week, the team had a discussion about modernising the Greenstone 3 interface. The improvements that I have made so far were well received and we discussed various ways to improve it further. For example, one of the things we are currently trialling is showing the whole document (rather than just the first section) when you visit a document in a collection. Each section can then be contracted or expanded in either the table of contents or the document itself (using little + and – symbols) to make navigating around the document more intuitive. When a search result returns a particular document section, that section is automatically expanded and the others contracted to provide a consistent interface.

We have also fixed up Realistic Books so that it works properly in the new skin, and we are also discussing ways for Realistic Books to be available by default in any collection (i.e. not only those that specify the correction option at build time).

The week started with small odds and ends: answering some questions on the mailing list, fixing Greenstone3 compilation so that a system-dependent file would get generated (instead of using the wrong ready-made binary version from SVN), checking that the port number could still be successfully changed on Greenstone 3 (we run “ant configure” to do so now). The latter half of the week was taken up by working on a couple of the tickets for Greenstone 3: While it turned out that export.pl functions well in GS3 from the command-line and through GLI, the GS3 OAIServer validation appears to be more involving. At present, though the initial operations have validated, more complex ones are still not working as they should. I’ll be continuing to work on this, this week.

Hi all, welcome to another Greenstone development blog entry. Last week we finished up our work helping the FLAX team create a binary installer for FLAX that would work for any version of the Mac operating system. We also mapped out what needed to be done before we can release Greenstone 3.05 and we have started working on that. So far we’ve made decent progress and things are looking good for a release in the near future.

One of the big things that I am working on at the moment is adding extra features to the “oran” skin, which is likely to become the new default skin for Greenstone 3. In particular I have been working on various features that are present in Greenstone 2 but not available in this development skin yet, such as search term highlighting and search term frequency.

So that is what we will be continuing to work on this week.

Greenstone has a new macro that lets you share documents in social networks or email systems, using Addtoany tool . The new macro is called _shareme_  that belongs to package Global in document.dm. The macro accepts two parameters: _1_ is the title of the link, and _2_ is the link to share. For _2_, the [srclink] is the default option, but any other metadata can be used too. The only requirement is that the value of that metadata must contain a well-formed URL that begins with “http://”.

If _2_ is left blank, then the link will point to the Greenstone version of the document.

You have to edit your format statement and add something like this:_shareme_([dc.Title],[srclink])

and then you will see “Share+, Facebook, Twitter, Mail , LinkedIn” icons.

There is also a brief version called _sharemesmall_ that requires the same parameters and only shows Share+ icon.

The macro code is available with version 2.84. If you are using v.2.83 or earlier you have to edit document.dm file and add the following block:

**** Macro code – Begin ****

package Global

# Social network support
# Defined here in document, as the most likely place this will be used in
# within a document view, however its package is 'Global' because you
# might equally want this in a search or browse list

# _1_ = e.g. title
# _2_ = [srclink] or left empty.  If left empty, then it will share the internal GS document

<span style=\'padding-left:8px;\' class=\'a2a_kit a2a_default_style\'>
_sharemescript_(_1_,_2_)
<a class=\'a2a_dd\' href=\'http://www.addtoany.com/share_save\'>Share</a>
<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"http://static.addtoany.com/menu/page.js\"></script>
</span>
}

**** Macro code – End ****

After last week’s bug discovery got fixed at the start of this week (there were issues with HTML files that had non-English filenames interlinking on a Mac OS), we went back to testing the Greenstone binaries on Windows, Linux and Mac. Finally, after uploading all the files onto SourceForge and adjusting the pages there as well as updating Greenstone.org’s own download page, we succeeded in releasing Greenstone 2.84 today!

To grab the Greenstone 2.84 binary for your operating system, visit the download page at Greenstone.org. This page also has the source distributions available in zip and tar.gz formats. Otherwise, you can always expand your binary installation with source code by grabbing the “source-component” archive files from the same download page.

The Greenstone 2.84 Release Notes contain installation instructions as well as details on how to use the latest Greenstone extensions like the PDFBox extension (for later versions of PDF) and OpenOfficeConverter (which can handle the latest Office docx format).