MePrints

The culmination of about 6 months work has been realised today with the release of MePrints 1.0

MePrints is distribute here:  http://files.eprints.org/467/

The distribution takes the form of a folder of eprints plugins which can be easily deployed on any EPrints 3.1 or greater with an patch file to add nice optional functionality.

We are hoping that MePrints will bring a more user centric aspect to digital repositories.

For more information about installing the plugin have a look at our wiki pages: http://wiki.eprints.org/w/MePrintsOverview

I would like to thank Seb Francois, Marcus Ramsden and Tim Miles-Board for their hard work on this project. Hopefully you will soon see MePrints coming to a repository near you

This week in meprints we’ve been looking at a nice generic way to make our widgets embedable into users websites or igoogle Marcus is planning to cook up some javascript which transcludes widgets from a users public profile…

having seen Daves chat about blogs this week i thought id include a picture to brighten the place up a bit. It might not get the pulses racing but its probably worth 1000 words.

this is Marcus

At the repofringe09 this year as well as some very good talks there was a developer challenge. The challenge was to give a user something that would benefit them using only theyre name and email address. For the challenge i knocked up a profile page combining information from eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk with information from the ecs RDF system. page (users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pm5/repofringe) included: picture automatically generated bio, a selection of statistics and graphs about user deposits, a graph of co authors, a keywords tag cloud, graphical-paper-mashup-slideshow-thing, google maps of where the user had presented, an automatically generated working bio (from the RDF)  and the persons “Mention-it” search (props to Tim Donohue http://code.google.com/p/mention-it/)

The entry one and it was only as i was presenting it i realised “most of this would make a really good set of widgets for meprints”. This confirms our suspicions about users having a central focal point in the repository being attractive and gave me some great ideas for widgets.

to jazz up meprints marcus has added some scriptaculous magic so that users can drag widgets between areas of the display layout. very jazzy…

we have also started looking into making our google gagets

we had a big hoo harr about how profile pages should layout. in the interest of not working two hard we decided to make a layout manager plugin so that people can write thier own custom layouts if they want. weve settled for simple 1 or 2 collum layouts by default.

This week in MEPrints we have been evaluating our new profile plugin. Since it seems to work fairly wellwe have outlined 10 basic widgets which will now be implimented using basic information in eprints.

top 10 downloads

10 most recent uploads

quick upload widget (allows user to begin the deposit process on their profile page)

eprints issues report (reports issues with eprints)

picture (implimented)

user details (implimented)

user tools (implimented)

and a few others i cant remember

All About MEPrints is a JISC rapid inovvations project to build a profile system for the EPrints software. The aim is that a user in the repository will have a page which promotes their identity within the repository. It is hoped this will improve user <-> repository relations and also provide useful information for user <-> user interactions.

We have begun by examining the usecases for information from the eprints services development requests and feedback about the profile system from language box (feedback was attained at user workshops).

Following the last blog we concluded that MEPrints needs to:

be a plugin system for eprints.

the Profile will be a plugin and then each element of it will be a Plugin called a widget (a la igoogle )

The Profile frame work should have an inwards facing “Home page” for the user which has their information and statistics available. The user controls what is displayed in their home page.

The Profile framework should also include and outward facing “Profile page” the contents of which is controlled by the repository administrator. The profile page is accessible to the internet in the same way as a an eprint in the archive.

the work for the week is:

• build the Profile framework for dynamically loading plugins

• make the default widgets (personal picture, user details, user tools)