developmental

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To be done (updated)

News, Bugs and Bugettes

minor bugettes

* the modules footnotes and biblio have been installed; the according tags are 'fn' and 'bib' but so far I have not got the tags working yet. The footnotes are working now, now you can use the fn tag to create numbered footnotes at the bottom of an article. You need to switch the 'Input format' to 'full html' to do so. The 'bib' tag probabloy also works, the biblio module as such has always been working, so you can enter bibliographic references into the text with the bib tag, which also go into a shared database. This rocks!

* The book module has been tried for the first time, it works, check it out
(left menu bar 'books' or create content books).

* the module blog api has been enabled. this makes it possible to use certain blogging tools to create research journal entries. I have not tried it, maybe acracia can tell us how it works.

* The links administration database works but this menu point weblinks is strange. It lists many catgeroies from taxonomy but does not shjow links which have been entered in those postings which belong to the categories. It shows only one link which I have entered under 'create content' --> weblinks. It would be nice to have under weblinks all the links on the site which anybody enters under the according categories.

Other news

Contributors have now rights for node management and input management; basically this means when adding a new research journal entry or other content type you have 2 new fields, one for 'input format' and one for 'publishing options'. the latter lets you decide if you want your contribution to be seen on the front page or not, published or not; 'input format' is very important; standard is 'limited html', but if you switch to 'full html' you can use basically all html tags; what is quite useful is for instance the img tag, you can now reference images how you like, they don't need to be physically on this site; the option 'php' is for experts only.

The diff module has now been installed. This will make visible the difference between versions of a document and should become very valuable when different people edit the same text.

A User Profile that makes sense

As I tried to formulate, conceptually, what i thought this site should become is to have on one hand a range of content streams -- in the manner of a multimedia online magazine -- and on the other hand an enhanced user profile which allows 'social software' type things to happen but in a really nice way which fits the needs of a research community.

I have created a few custom fields so far such as

  • Location
  • Messaging
  • Personal Information
  • Tagging
  • my newsletters"

but those are just a quickshot into the direction I would like things to see develop. Therefore I would like to collectively ask the question:

What would be useful to have in an enhanced and expanded / expandable user profile?

For instance I thought it might be useful to have on the profile page the delicius links, not just as one link but expanded. Also, quite an obvious ting to have would be a field for a cv and/or a short bio.

Another more important thing might be a field in the way of how we now have "what do you think about FLOSS" to put something about people's research interests so that people with matching interests could find together (I might do that in a quick and dirty way).

Has anybody more ideas in that direction?

The profile is a major issue to be tackled now. How to
really furnish that user profileso that it becomes a home, a hub, a launchpad, a point of reference where you manifest yourself, your work, your interests on your own terms as well as shared terms?

Categories, Taxonomy, Creating a Language

It has been mentioned by different people that it would be nice to 'create our own dictionary' (Lindsay) or to have a "shared taxonomy" (acracia). For me those 2 things are roughly the same. How can you invent a new language in drupal? through the taxonomx/category module. Yet this needs ot be done with sense and reason. As I understand it there are hierarchical categries where it is required to choose from drop down menues which is good for creating 'hard' content cateegories which makes it easy to display content according to categories. I have also added a field 'Topic' which allows free tagging. I have no idea what happens with those categories, in which way they could be made useful or how the two types could be made work together --> the rigid almost semantic web style hierarchic categories and fluid tagging without relationships of any logical kind.

Older Entries, some still valid

- as installed drupal offers only one author for a blog or any other entry. I tried to fix this by adding a new author field to some of the content types. but it still needs themeing using node.tpl.php to make this the main and only author field; the community on the support mailinglist was very helpful and gentle;

- headings and table of content: automatic generation of table of content from documents like in twiki

footnotes: TNL should have classical footnotes (more like comments, a second text stream, not like endnotes or bibliographic references); there should be an easy way to add foot notes when entering text; footnotes should also be searchable; in 'books' footnotes could be on third column on the right (right sidebar)

references: bibliographic references should be entered using one specific format, for instance Harvard referencing; each reference entered using the right format should then go into a shared references database; this reference data base should / could become an interesting share knowledge body of its own, linked to categories and also maybe names of researchers who entered them (you could then ask the researcher for more info on this or that book) the references should be part of a text AND part of a shared emergeing references database.

- index: if texts have indexes you should be able to browse contributions according to what appears in the index, like there would be a meta index of all indexes within which for example there is the name Adam Smith; you can then see all the texts that have something about Adam Smith

- image captions: there should be a way of entering text to appear as the caption of an image; within this text there could be different data fields relating to the image, so that thjis is actually like a more reader froiendly version of the image data base.

Navigation

a number of issues relating to the overall navigation and structural design of the site

- related texts: there should be a way of telling the system if there are other texts in the system you know of which relate to this text -- this should be in the right navigation bar (assuming that we keep the current design) it should be an easy way of doing this like just telling node numbers; (I have tried to solve this through adding the field 'node_reference', this goes into the right direction but is not perfect yet)

- more flexibility with content types which use sidebars differently
- generally more context depending design

Design

The site cries for more design work being done. In particular a new header section would be nice. Anyone bung mea logo please?

- most design of the overall site can be done with CSS and I start getting it how that works
- The top area offers itself foremost to be designed; rather than just a logo it needs to be the whole top area which gets a styleover (and of course it should still match with the rest)
- it needs a logo too, but maybe something visual which can be on the right hand side and same width as right sidebar width 48 height 55 pixels

Language(term): 

Topic: 

two points done

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dear all

thanks to the wonderful drupal module developers, two new modules have been installaed, footnotes and biblio. with footnotes you have a new tag so that nit will ajutomatically be recognized as a numbered footnote. biblio is a professional reference database which we have connected to our system. it can work with taxonomy and currently free tagging is enabled; yet maybe it would be better to have fixed categories too and to link this all together, however, to understand how that all works will take a while

best
admin

new field added node_reference

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now you can add a node reference from a drop down menu of everything.
not yet sure what this is for but this can surely be customized with a view. it is interesting now to learn how new fields can be added which rely on built in functiosns to display information.

actually, maybe what you would want is node references by node number, as every item is a node with a unique nr id, am i right? Maybe by entering numbers with a special tag you can create a related links menu for the side bar. so i need to get this right when selecting the data type for the field.

i am still not quite sure which tag module to install
a.

User Profile and Language

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First of all thanks for all your work. I have however two comments, one of which (user guide) has been touched on before. Anyway...

*What would be useful to have in an enhanced and expanded / expandable user profile?
The profile is a major issue to be tackled now. How to really furnish that user profileso that it becomes a home, a hub, a launchpad, a point of reference where you manifest yourself, your work, your interests on your own terms as well as shared terms?*

This issue for me is never going to change unless I can understand the system better, so a basic guide or at least some pointers as where to go to learn from the technical folks of this community would help, then we would at least know that everyone understands to a basic level. I’d like to go right back to the start and reference something that Lisa said in the first development comment that ‘users are experts in their own areas, and it seems to me that the advanced use of a system like drupal does allow people to bring their experiences to building an online system’. I agree with this wholeheartedly, but I cannot unfortunately do any more unless I can work with the system. My skills perhaps lean more toward the editorial and artistic content of the site but I am also conceptually interested in the taxonomy system and would love to understand more about how this works with a view to creating new systems. This brings me to the second point…

*Categories, Taxonomy, Creating a Language
It has been mentioned by different people that it would be nice to 'create our own dictionary' (Lindsay) or to have a "shared taxonomy" (acracia). For me those 2 things are roughly the same. How can you invent a new language in drupal? through the taxonomx/category module.*

…I disagree with this statement, I may not know much about the technicalities of computer systems, but to me language and taxonomy are different things…they are related, but they are different (although I do agree that this module is one way forward) A taxonomy however is a category system, and the relationships between these systems could also be said to be taxonomical in the way that context helps to enable a bigger picture. Language is however the code that enables the taxonomies…so to me a new language is a new code, which will therefore generate a new set of taxonomical relationships. This new code is what I was meaning by dictionary. The localisation module is perhaps another way forward?

Can I enable English default in the language section by the way instead of the American one? The zzzs are really annoying.

Lindsay

tutorial

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I keep repeating myself when I say I ment to write a simple howto or tutorial about things that one can do on this site and I totally understand how important that is for kickstarting things. In a way I am i n a good situation to understand this because I am maybe maximally semi-skilled tehcnically and so i cna see that drupal is leaving the normal user a bit behind, you are somehow supposed ot find your way around the system instead of being constantly chaperoned as other more user friendly cms's do. but then they dont offer anything near the versatility of drupal. so, on one hand i can only repeat myself, on the other maybe we can take it one thing at a time.

just answering your last question about language: you can choose in which language you see the site by going to "My Account" and the click 'edit' and scroll down till you find the language options. You can switch to see the built in English there. HOwever, i doubt it will be more British than the other one.

You can also change language options for the whole site byclicking on Localization. Someone has set up scotish Gaelic there, I guess that must have been you, so you discovered that already. thats the nright spirit.

now, why have i put this my-english there which is based on us-english? because drupal allows you to edit the text which the site uses (except for the built in english which you cant change). You go to 'Manage Strings' on top of the menu and click on it and then you can enter words which appear in the drupal menu and find places where this word is found and enter your alternative. this way you can customize a language. so try that out maybe with scotish gaelic or change those parts where you find zzz's in the current MyEnglish.

as to language, taxonomoy, etc, I think in a grammatological sense you are right, but I was not literally talking about inventing a language, yet more about discussing and agreeing on terms. If we really 'share' a taxonomy then that means that in theory we agree on a meaning of a term because we use that term to categorise content and organise content. So if you go to 'Category'
http://www.thenextlayer.org/admin/content/taxonomy

you see that there are some categories whihc are linked to certain content types such as forum and image gallery, where the catgeories are conditional for that content type. apart form those there are also free categories which we can design for our own purposes.

the important part is here

Hierarchy:
Disabled
Single
Multiple
Allows a tree-like hierarchy between terms of this vocabulary.
Related terms
Allows related terms in this vocabulary.
Free tagging
Content is categorized by typing terms instead of choosing from a list.
Multiple select
Allows nodes to have more than one term from this vocabulary (always true for free tagging).
Required
If enabled, every node must have at least one term in this vocabulary.
Weight:

If you chose hierarchy multiple you can have hierarchical categories whihc create tree like structures. So far I have used the vocabulary 'content' for instance in this way to construct a vocabulary with quite generic content descrption terms. I see some additons have been made. Thats all great. But for instance, we could discuss more in the forum why we have whihc terms and agree an them. so maybe we would come to s structure which is shared and foinds better solutions for things. for instance, we could make another vocabulary which is more about content/ideas/ and not so much about form/format and by linking the two you get pretty sharp descriptions, for instance that you have an 'interview' (generic descriptor) about 'topicname' (individual content descriptor). so currently for this second function I have created the vocabulary Topic which has the setting of 'free tagging'. here you can create a free number of tags, rather than one very sharp one. whereas currently the use is not so obvious maybe those things become more relevant when you have more users and a much higher content turnover and a fast growing archive. The taxonomy module allows us to make information retrievable, to create channels by naming things and then opening 'blocks' or pages which link to everything published under that term, or a combination of terms (these are filter settings you use in the views module but thats we talk about another time). thus, so far what we do with taxonomy we set up relationships between hierarchies of words on one hand, which allow us to have boxes or containers into which we can throw content items without loosing site of them completely.

One thing that you should try for sure is adding to the news aggregator.
It has become so important ... I am talking of RSS whihc sometime in the past stood for sonmething else but now stands for 'really simple syndication'. In plain english that means a way of showning bits of other sites on your site. Normally that would be a headline and maybe byline and the first three lines of every article from another site, just a 'teaser'. when you click it you go to the other site. this is why it is tolerated and has become accsutomated that on the web people 'subscribe' to other sites 'feeds'. now drupal is really good with that. if you go to News Aggregator http://www.thenextlayer.org/admin/content/aggregator
you can create new categories for the feeds to be added and you can add feeds. a feed is usually marked by this little orange sign with a point and two curves.
the feed for our blogs for instance is http://www.thenextlayer.org/blog/feed
so if you go to the sitres whihc you like and use, or sites whihc you come across and would like to monitor, if not by going there daily, you can add their feed to the nextlayer news feeds. you can decide how often it is updated - I would propose to be sensible and not update once every hour, much too hectic for the sites we tend to use. so, over time, if we all keep adding the feeds of interesting places on the line we get a good news aggregator 'bouquet' of syndicated content which in its own eight makes an interesting data sculpture. so much for now, hope to find time to write more soon. looking forward to oyur reports from experiments.

basically its all about the spirit of discovery. you cannot really seriously break anything, i hope, maybe mess things up a bit, but then the online janitors will come to rescue.

Thanks

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Dear Janitors

Thanks for that, it makes things a little clearer. You actually also answered a couple of points that I felt I needed to air my views over. The first one was the one of 'literal language'. Yes I am interested in this, but more importantly I am interested in the relationship between terms, rather than actual terms. In my very first point about language, I suggested that we could create a language that had a symbolic meaning, so the suggestion of a debate on what specific terms mean to users is more along the lines of what I was thinking...

The second point was the news aggregator and the amount of stuff that is going in there. I took a spare half hour to quickly flick through stuff, and it took that time just to get through a few days. I pulled out only one thing about a conference that really interested me. My concern was that if everybody (including users in the future) linked all of their bookmark feeds into there, then the slower moving research stuff would get lost in the medium moving media arts opps and the fast moving blogs and zines...I wondered if there would be any way of categorising these feeds? Again that could be something that was discussed in a forum?

I can't promise to mop up after myself but will tackle the zzzzs, keep your fingers crossed for me that my performance and projects go ok tomorrow...maybe be in the Central Belt papers...not many artists swim through light projections in their underwear!

Lindsay