CONTENTdm release notes, December 2020

Release overview recording

Supporting materials

CONTENTdm release overview presentation slides, December 2020

Multiple items can be added to Saved Items at once, making it easier for end-users to manage in bulk 

 Note: To enable and use the Saved Items feature, please see Items and March 2020 Release Notes for more details. 

When we first released the Saved Items feature, you could only save items one by one. Now you will see a “Save All” button on the search/browse page, which will save all items on current page for you. If all items on this page are saved, the button will change to “Remove All”. This comes in handy when you want to save all items coming out of a specific search. 

Bulk save is still bound by the 200 maximum saved items limit. It will not save all items on the page if it would exceed 200 items.  

Saved Items can now be linked to OCLC LDAP accounts for you to continue working on

When using the Saved Items feature as an anonymous user, the items are saved in the browser’s local storage. You’ll lose your saved items if you switch to another browser, or another computer or phone, as well as when you clear your browser cache.  

To keep your saved items with you, you can create an account: 

The link will take you to the log in page so you can create an account or log in:  

 Note: You need to enable login page in your Website Configuration Tool (Global Settings > Navigation > Menu > Enable login) if you haven’t already. 

 Note: If for some reason, you prefer not to enable login or not let your users create accounts, you can remove the paragraph "Log in or create an account to keep your saved items" by editing your TMX files. Read Localization for more details.

CONTENTdm user accounts use OCLC LDAP accounts, which are the same as CONTENTdm administration accounts. Admin users won’t need to create accounts again. The same account will work for all CONTENTdm sites which have the Saved Items feature turned on. But the saved items lists will be different for each site.  

If you save some items as an anonymous user, then log in, the system will try to merge the items with those you already have in your account. If total items would exceed 200 during merging (after removing duplicates), the newest saved items before you logging in would be discarded – those over 200.  

If you log out with some saved items, they will remain on the local storage. This means if you are working on a public computer, you should remove all of your saved items before you leave. 

You cannot work across browsers/devices when you are logged in simultaneously – the items might not sync correctly. You will need to log out of the browser/device you stopped working on, and log in to the browser/device you intend to work on. CONTENTdm does have a time-out mechanism built-in for inactivity. 

Growing cookbook with new recipes

We’ve published many new recipes since the last release. We’ve discussed a few of them during the session: Ask the Experts: CONTENTdm’s new cookbook recipes, (10/22/2020). Please see the recording and slides to learn more. 

Below is the list of the recipes in the Ask the Experts session: 

• Internet Archive BookReader [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]
• Show all pages of PDF in viewer [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]
• Create custom links from metadata [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]
• Embed Sketchfab 3D [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]
• Clone landing page Browse button [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]
• Event logging debug script [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]
• Custom page templates [Link to overview] [Link in download portal]

And a few newer ones: 

• URL fragment anchor link [Link in download portal]
• Mirador 3 viewer integration [Link in download portal]

We’ll elaborate on a few of them below. 

More options for page redirects to support migrating content from external web servers 

While working on switching every CONTENTdm site to the new responsive website, we have developed the mechanism to redirect Legacy 6.X pages to desirable URLs in new website to help smooth the transition. This can be a one-to-one redirect or rule-based redirect.  

Now that we’ve successfully made the transition, this function can potentially be used for other use cases. For example, if you are migrating content from a different repository to CONTENTdm, you could request for rules to be set up to redirect old URLs to new landing pages in CONTENTdm. This way, your users would experience less interruption accessing the content and relying less on search engines to re-discover the content. This could also work for new customers migrating to CONTENTdm.  

Miscellaneous fixes for bugs reported by current users 

• Fixed a bug where certain kind of JPGs (with embedded metadata) don’t upload through FileManager 
• Fixed a bug where the string “/searchterm” in a searching URL duplicates when searching multiple collections 
• Fixed a bug so that even malformed 6.X URLs will redirect to responsive website 
• Fixed a bug that when accessed a 6.X page over https, the redirect leads to an infinite loop