code4libbers,
Have you ever worked with Greenstone, the open-source collection hosting
solution Greenstone? Ever try to do anything more that superficial
customization of the interface?
Have you ever held your breath, waiting for someone's reaction when you
nonchalantly send a link to a page of your collection (in the
pre-tinyurl days) looking something like
http://emeraldview.tourolib.org/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-
0demo--00-0----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-1l--11-en-50---20-
about---00-0-1-00-0-0-11-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=demo&cl=CL1
&d=HASHa891721179ce8bc74b905a.6.1
We needed the proven Unicode support of Greenstone, but shuddered at
this and similar issues arising out of the antiquity of Greenstone's
codebase. [cue triumphant music] So we set out to create: EmeraldView!
a new lightweight (for now) PHP frontend for Greenstone, using the
CodeIgniter framework. The above URL becomes
http://emeraldview-demo.tourolib.org/greenstone-demo/
courier-n-160-nov-dec-1996-dossier/6/1
Happily, Greenstone collections can be configured out of the box to
build using Sqlite for metadata storage, and Lucene for indexing, as
opposed to default MG or MG++ [http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/mg/]. This makes
it surprisingly easy to tap into the backend. Using EmeraldView
requires no modifications to the native Greenstone code; it simply sits
on top.
Theming and i18n/l10n are supported, though we're still working out the
details. Check us out at http://emeraldview.tourolib.org/ - there's a
demo there which reflects our current stage of development. (We don't
have a designer working on it yet, so it still looks rather brutish.)
We'd love to hear your suggestions or Greenstone hacking stories. You
can checkout the code using
$ svn co https://svn.tourolib.org/emeraldview/trunk dest-dir
Cheers,
--
Yitzchak Schaffer
Systems Manager
Touro College Libraries
33 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
Tel (212) 463-0400 x5230
Fax (212) 627-3197
Email yitzchak.schaf...@tourolib.org
