As there wasn’t much to report two weeks ago, I will combine the previous 2 weeks together.

Work continues to go well on Greenstone 3, our list of tickets (basically our TODO list) is getting smaller at a steady rate. Only a few things remain to be done on the new skin and most of the other tickets are fairly minor in comparison to getting the new skin ready. So things continue to look good for a 3.05 release in the near future.

We found a good solution to the problem I discussed a few weeks ago, we now have it so that only sections can be collapsed/expanded in the table of contents and not the individual chapters. These can still be manipulated in the document by using the + and – icons next to the title of each chapter. The chapter links in the table of contents now simply takes you to that chapter by jumping you down the page, rather that the “focusing” idea we were considering, where clicking on a link would collapse all sections of the document except the one you clicked on. We also added a “back to top” link so that it was easy to get back up to the table of contents again.

We have used this same collapse/expand idea in the classifier pages (e.g. Subject/How to/Organisation  etc.) so that, rather than loading a new page when a user clicks a subject (for example) we now remain on the same page and “expand” the subject. This results in a much more intuitive way to browse subjects than the previous implementation which would only “expand” one subject at a time.

The query result page has been tidied up and now displays messages like “Displaying 1 to 20 of 100 documents” and has next and previous buttons go to the next and previous pages of results (this obviously existed in the old Greenstone3 skin but it’s new for this skin). If you enter only one or two search terms then it will display information such as “cat occurs 5 times in 3 documents”, however for three or more search terms it shows a compressed view such as “the (25739) farming (228) cat (5)”.

This week will mostly be focused on cleaning up the skin so that it will be easy for Greenstone users to modify it however they wish.

Categories: Greenstone3