Sam’s Greenstone Blog 19/8/2011
Since the last time I wrote I have mostly been continuing work on the Document Maker. The back-end (the part that does all the hard work) is around 80% complete and is ready enough for me to start working more on the front-end (the part that makes the back-end easier to use).
I have also been tidying up some of the Format Manager work that the other Sam did before he left. He had modified the JQuery UI source code so that it allowed multiple nested lists of items (basically lists inside lists, which the original code did not allow for). The only problem with this approach (directly modifying the source code) is that it does not allow us to easily upgrade our version of JQuery UI in the future. To remedy this problem we downloaded the original JQuery UI source code and worked out what parts of the modified code we needed to keep. We then took these parts and put them into a different Javascript file and used the prototype functionality of Javascript to make sure that the modified code would overwrite the original code.
We originally tried contacting the JQuery UI developers to see if we could get Sam’s changes included in the official source code but they responded saying that this new list-inside-list functionality was outside the scope of what the original lists were intended for.
The Format Manager is still very much a work in progress and, although it will be included in the next release of Greenstone 3, we will be still recommending that people make their format statement modifications through editing the collectionConfig.xml file at this point.
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