June 2013

Media galleries

Media galleries are slide shows. There is a summary page with a listing of all galleries and preview of their slides. Clicking on the preview opens a full size view of the slide as pop up. The summary page cannot be configured. Clicking a media gallery shows a larger, configurable grid of slides. Clicking on a slide either shows a strangely small pop-up view of the slide or large view of the slide in a new page (configurable).

Images can be uploaded one by one. There is no bulk upload option. It is quite time consuming to upload a slide show. Powerpoints or odps cannot be uploaded...

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Data files

Data can be uploaded in variety of ways. It looks like anywhere you can add and edit text there is also an option to attach multiple files. They need to be smaller than 128 MB. For example, this blog entry has a file attached. Simple pages can have attached files as well. Another option is to use the class app and attach files as class materials. Files there need be smaller than 256 MB. Software uploads could also be used to distribute files. This option has the advantage of having a way of versioning data sets. Files size is up to 256 MB there as well.

a footer

It is useful to have a consistent footer for each openscholar page. It can contain for example links to higher level departmental web sites, fas or harvard.edu. That can be easily accomplished by creating a custom html widget in the layout view perhaps called "footer" with the desired content and then adding it simply to the footer layout section for All Pages and the Front Page.

Openscholar URLs for isites

URL forwarding is now available under Settings. This resolves the issue we had with isites URLs. Excellent !

We also have an isite web presence which unfortunately has pretty ugly URLs. Until isite also gets custom URLs it may be useful to have simple links from an openscholar site with a nice URL to the isite. That is possible by simply creating a page for each isite page. The page then contains the link. Unfortunately, there is no way to have redirection at these pages because that requires javascript or changes at the server level both of  which are not allowed, for good...

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