This week we’ve been hard at work testing Greenstone 3. We’ve managed to discover a few bugs and have fixed several of them already. While we’re at it we’ve also added horizontal classifiers into Greenstone 3 (frequent Greenstone 2 users may find this a very welcome addition). A horizontal classifier has the top level of the classifier (e.g. ‘A’ ‘B-C’ ‘D-F’ etc.) displayed in a row along the top of the browsing area instead of vertically down the page.

There’s not much more to report about my week as it has mostly involved testing and bug fixing, which is not particularly interesting to write about.

This week I have been testing and have fixed several minor bugs in Greenstone 3. I have also started working on a new feature (to be included in 3.06 most likely), which will theoretically allow much more advanced collection editing than what we’ve ever had before. At the moment a single page in a collection can be made up of many different files and if you want to edit something then you have to know which file it came from. For example, the basic file used for a document view is document.xsl (stored in the interfaces directory), but if someone wants to modify part of it then they could add their own template to their collectionConfig.xml file or they could create their own interface file and put it into the transform directory of their collection. This new feature will keep track of what file each change has come from and (probably) allow you to edit the file via your web browser.

While I am working on this feature Anu will be taking over testing for the release.

Sorry that I haven’t posted an update in a while, I keep forgetting to do it. Good news though, we are now in the final testing stages of Greenstone 3 and should hopefully have a 3.05 release candidate ready before the end of the week. We’ve also got some exciting things planned for 3.06 as well so we’re wanting to get 3.05 out as soon as possible.

There is not a lot to report other than that. Testing seems to be going well and assuming we don’t find any major bugs then keep an eye out for a release candidate in the near future.

Over the week, have been working on the activate.pl script (and things that it needs). The details are at http://trac.greenstone.org/ticket/825

For the latest changes made today, need to retest these changes against GS3 on Windows.

Still need to test the entire process on Linux.

• At the start of last week, finished off the task of the GS3 “debuginfo” button that now appears next to the login button.
• The Greenstone tutorial xml files can now include a MajorVersion element with number attribute to specify if the instructions are for GS3 or GS2 and will get processed by the XSLT to display or hide such elements depending on the active version.
• Joshua Scarsbrook discovered two bugs compiling GS3 on a Mac and has helped us fix these (but one of the fixes still needs to be tested on his machine). Unfortunately there were some issues with setting the Java preferences on my account on the Mac here. At present, GS3 can’t be compiled there because it requires Java 1.6.
• After Dr Bainbridge fixed error handling and display of the PDFBox Extension, it became easier to debug a PDFBox Extension bug discovered by a member on the mailing list. She helped us to track it down and it turned out that the PDFBox extension did not try to first look for and use any JRE included in a GS2 binary when running the java -version test.
• While trying to work out why searching 3 digit numbers crashed the server (when Diego wanted to try the ifl=1 parameter to the GS2 URL), I first found and tracked down a very troublesome bug that I had accidentally introduced into GS2. The documents in browse or search results would not display and their URLs looked strange (with the word handle in their path). It turned out that in January, I’d committed the -DDOCHANDLE option to CXXFLAGS in a win32.mak file that was meant for the experimental work Dr Bainbridge and Diego had been doing with REST URLs. I meant to commit only the RSS support code they had written. Dr Bainbridge then fixed the bug Diego had originally noticed to do with the ifl parameter.
• Some translation work and looked at a few mailing list questions.
• Currently started work on activate.pl which should perform in perl the task that GLI currently does of stopping the GS2 or GS3 server while moving the building to index and restarting the server again.