GUI, friends, delete provider, be a provider and new style?

[sfkeller]

Hello,

I'd like to ask some questions as I am new here:

* I had quite some troubles with the search form handling the 'Archives' field: This should be sorted.

* After having added a data provider using 'Add Archive', who can delete a data provider and how?

* Is the functionality of being a data harvester itself implemented now?

* Are there plans to follow the 'friends' elements in order to discover new data providers and register them automatically?

* Could someone add a FAQ entry or so on how to adapt a style to an own style (I would have expected an images and skin subdir)?

-- Stefan

[sfkeller]

I recognized now, that there is an instruction about customizing the look & feel in the doc... But it's still rather short and changing logos aren't mentioned (logos being in subdir ./public/)?

... Just some additional questions:

* Why does a data provider need to fill in title and description when there is OAI-PMH with verb=Identify?

* Are there plans to implement something like a fuzzy query on "All fields" which would be 'Google-like'? (one could port Lucene for the inverted index?)

* This seems to be a professionally run project. Perhaps one could add a wiki and implement something like a milestone plan where proposed add ons which make it into next release could be announced?

-- Stefan

[asmecher]

Hi Stefan,

FYI, We're not far from an incremental release of the Harvester with a few new features and tune-ups. I hope to have a little more information available about this shortly. In answer to your questions:

1. I've committed a fix to CVS to sort the archives list by default; see http://pkp.sfu.ca/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=2430 for a patch.

2. Currently, only the administrator can delete a data provider via the Archives list. We've discussed changing this (e.g. to allow archive submitters to update records) but haven't reached a decision yet.

3. Data provider functionality isn't currently included, but several users have expressed interest in this feature, including one who is potentially implementing it; given the modular design of the Harvester (e.g. harvesters and metadata formats are plug-ins) it will probably be a complex task.

4. We haven't looked into the "Friends" elements, but this is certainly a good candidate for future inclusion.

Regarding styles and customization, we'll be adding a few features in the near future such as stylesheet and logo uploads via the GUI. In the meantime you'll need to do this by hand e.g. by replacing the logo file in the distribution directory.

Fuzzy querying logic would probably not be too complicated to add, given the Harvester's existing inverted index, but we haven't had much call for it; I'll bring it up with the team.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[sfkeller]

Thanks for the fast reply.

Regarding styles and customization I would prefer manual instructions in order to keep the code minimal.

Do you have examples of localization of the GUI in other languages like german?

For the fuzzy query logic I'm a totally biased fan of Lucene. There seem to exist at least a proprietary port from Zend which at least proves the feasibility of a file-compatible PHP port.

-- Stefan