How we'd communicate to get there,I'm not sure. Depends on who shows up. But setting up a listserv sounds like a massive hassle.The Springshare forums are an option, but Idon't like that they're hidden from public viewand, therefore, ungoogleable.
@Jesse: If you've put together something useful that's not hardwired to your site (or can be abstracted), then Iwould like to have a look -- maybe other people would as well.
What I have to contribute is some Grunt tasks for automating frontend tasks. Nothing groundbreaking, but I'm hopingwe can set up some scaffolding and/or best practices about how to construct and maintain LibGuides sites that would allowus to swap larger chunks of code & content down the line.
@Cindi: In my defense, I was being rhetorical as to why there's no plugin system. I wasn't trying to second-guess how you develop your products. Though I'm glad you're considering allowing more sophisticated customization for LibGuides. Navigation in particular is a thorny issue.
What I was trying to say is that if interested folks get together and communicate/collaborate on how we do things, we can figure out what holes we can plug ourselves and where Springshare should pitch in (if they can/want).
There's some simple stuff thatare worth documenting. For example, Josh mentioned that:
"The admin controls in LGseem to all be loaded dynamically via javascript, which makes them both very hard to customize and very easy to break. I have also noticed that changingthe ID of certain HTML elements in your template can have the unintended(and undocumented) effect of erasing particular admin features from your
template."I've listed these IDs here: https://gist.github.com/alehandrof/9f083aa03c287931d9f0#file-required-for-admin-html
Admittedly, the gist by itself make zero sense. But every admin who tries to customize their LibGuides templates will come across this issue.
Any ideas on where/how we can share things like this? I tried tweeting it to my 6 followers. To my surprise, it was not widely reported on :p
That sort of thing. Alex On 2014-09-25 23:48, Cindi Blyberg wrote:
OK, one more tidbit on this. I was chatting with Slaven, our CEO, and told him of the chatter on the list and the idea of a community-developed, curated set of plug-ins, along with templates, themes, etc., and he's totally excited about this idea. He (and I!) would love it if you all would chime in on this and other ideas on the Lounge so that we can figure out how to make them happen. We're going to set up a group on the Lounge for techie admins, but our Lounge admin is in the midst of moving so it might take a day or two. Thanks for all this great feedback, everyone! We are listening, and want to make these things happen. -cb On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 3:22 PM, Cindi Blyberg <cindi...@gmail.com> wrote:Hi Alex, That's a great question! I would surmise that a plug-in system and other advanced tech features don't exist yet for a couple of reasons. First, we're a small company. We have eight products and a small development team; right now the priority is getting out v2 apps. Second, we have more than 4500 LibGuides customers, and some have more than one site. The vast, vast majority of those folks use LibGuides out of the box, with a few color customizations that they accomplish with the UI (or a lot, as you've seen...). Some folks are advanced enough to figure out and alter the default CSS and put their customizations in the Custom JS/CSS field. Then there is this group. :) There are a few LibGuides admins who do customization at this group's level who aren't on this list (or are you? :) ). I'd also second the Lounge (springsharelounge.com) as a good group. There's an academic libraries group there, which is quite active. Cheers. On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 1:07 PM, Alex Armstrong <aarmstr...@acg.edu> wrote:The web content workflow and governance issues that were brought up are really important. I would love to discuss them at excruciating length. But content ownership conundrums and the frustrations of WYSIWYG editors are broader issues that can be usefully taken up in other threads. I de-lurked here because I saw an opening to discuss LibGuides with other people who have a stake in it, especially as a lightweight CMS. I think Josh's description of its limitations was very good. His feature propositions, including that of a curated plugin system, were even better. I have a question though: Why doesn't it exist already? LibGuides is limited, though the v2 API looks promising for client-side stuff. We should be talking with Springshare about improving workflows for admins -- such as (an example I came across today) being able to upload more than one image at a time. And, in the meantime, there's other stuff we can do now: community docs, templates, themes, best practices, etc. I've been surprised by the lack of this material, considering how widely LibGuides is implemented. Does anyone else find this stuff interesting? Alex On 09/25/2014 05:48 PM, Cindi Blyberg wrote:One more great guide to share - a literary journal from a k12 in Australia: http://home2.scotch.wa.edu.au/theraven_winter2014 For you LG admins out there - it's a series of RT content types that's governed by an external stylesheet. They have LibGuides CMS, and this private guide is in its own group. *back to lurking* On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Cindi Blyberg <cindi...@gmail.com> wrote: Jesse reminds me that I meant to point out that there is a "Paste fromWord" button in the RTE that will strip out all that microsoft nonsense. Not quite what you were asking for (suppressing tags from the RTE--I passed that suggestion on to the devs) but it's what we refer people to who break their formatting accidentally with a massive paste. There's also a "Paste as Plain Text" button that has a similar effect. On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 1:32 PM, Jesse Martinez <jesse.marti...@bc.edu> wrote: I can commiserate!The tactic we've used at our university was to use the data migration from LGv1 to LGv2 as a means to convene guide authors and rethink * the future overall layout of our guides (new side menu has been our design choice but complicates preexisting three- and four-column layouts); * their intended use (pastiche of related but independent boxes on the guide or something with a simple flow/concise content -- it's a philosophical discussion, for sure); * breakdown of content (when it is appropriate to have long detailed pages or break down into sub-pages, which have their own issues...); * the strict use of accessibility policies (must set up strict policies about funky colors & fonts, minimize use HTML tables, content column layout w.r.t. responsive design, etc.). I feel our internal conversations and meetings about rethinking LibGuides v2 with our staff have gone over well, and reiterating appropriate "best practices" or suggestions whenever I field a LibGuides question have birthed some improvements in guide construction. It's an ongoing battle, of course! There are some heavy-handed tactics in place here too. For instance we've hidden the Fonts button in the guide editor using CSS. span#cke_12 {display:none;} This doesn't stop custom html or copy/pasting Word content (ugh) from getting through, but it does allows us to say, "nope, we're not supporting Comic Sans!" On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 12:56 PM, Joshua Welker <wel...@ucmo.edu> wrote: I lol'ed several times reading your message. I feel the pain. Well, it isnice to know I am not alone. You are right that this in particular is an organizational problem and not a LibGuides problem. But unfortunately it has been an organizational problem at both of the universities whereI'veworked that use LibGuides, and it sounds like it is a problem at many other libraries. I'm not sure what it is about LibGuides that brings out the most territorial and user-marginalizing aspects of the librarian psyche. Does anyone have any positive experience in dealing with this? I am ontheverge of just manually enforcing good standards even though it willcreatea lot of enmity. LibGuides CMS has a publishing workflow feature that would force all guide edits to be approved by me so that I could stamp this stuff out each time it happens. To enforce, or not to enforce, that is the question-- Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageously poor usability, Or to take arms against a sea of ugly guides, And by forcing compliance with standards and best practices, end them? Josh Welker -----Original Message----- From: Code for Libraries [mailto:CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Will Martin Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2014 11:34 AM To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] LibGuides v2 - Templates and Nav 4. Admin controls are not very granular. With most aspects of editinga guide, you either have the option of locking down styles and templates completely (and oh your colleagues will howl) or allowing everything (and oh your eyeballs will scream). Some of these things could very well be improved in the future, and some probably will not.This! My librarians have successfully resisted every attempt to impose any kind of standardization. Visual guidelines? Nope. Content guidelines? Nope. Standard system settings? Nope. Anything less than 100% free reign appears to be anathema to them. The result, predictably, is chaos. Our guides run the gamut. We have everything: - Giant walls of text that no one ever reads. - Lovingly crafted lists of obscure library sources that rarely (if ever) bear any relation to what the patron is actually trying to do. - A thriving ecosystem of competing labels. Is it "Article Indexes", "Article Databases", just plain "Databases", or something more exotic? Depends which apex predator rules this particular neck of the jungle. - Green text on pink backgrounds with maroon borders. Other pages inthesame guide might go with different, equally eye-twisting color schemes. I'm not even sure how he's doing that without access to the style sheet, but he's probably taught himself just enough HTML to mangle things in an effort to use "friendly" colors. - Some guides have three or even FOUR rows of tabs. With drop-down submenus on most of them, naturally. - A few are nicely curated and easy to use, but they're in a distinct minority. I've tried. I've pushed peer-reviewed usability studies at them. I've reported on conference sessions explaining exactly why all these things are bad. I've brought them studies of our own analytics. I've had students sit down and get confused in front of them. Nothing has gotten through, and being the only web type at the library, I'm outnumbered. Just the thought of it makes me supremely tired. I'm sorry if this has digressed. LibGuides is not at fault, really. It's an organizational problem. LibGuides just seems to be the flash point for it. Will-- Jesse Martinez Web Services Librarian O'Neill Library, Boston College jesse.marti...@bc.edu 617-552-2509
