CONTENTdm release notes, March 2020

Supporting Materials

CONTENTdm release overview presentation slides, March 2020.

 

Features and enhancements

This release includes the following features: 

• Website users can save items to a personal page where they can export those items or share links with others. 
• A CONTENTdm Cookbook recipe to display the home page collection cards with a larger image and hover descriptions. 

See these features in more detail below. 

Website users can save items for exporting or sharing with others

 Note: If you are using a custom domain and would like to use the Saved Items feature, please contact OCLC Support to complete one additional configuration.

This feature creates a new page in your CONTENTdm website where end users can save items from your collections. Users can manage the items on this page, export them for use elsewhere, and share links to these items with others. 

On the day of release, you will not see any change to your website. The feature is optional and must be enabled in the Website Configuration Tool. Go to Global Settings > Items > Saved Items and click the “Enable saved items” toggle.  

 

Once enabled, the item pages and search pages in your website will display the UI for saving items (buttons labeled “☆ Save”). In the Website Configuration Tool you will see instructions about how to complete the process.  

 

You will need to create a link in your website navigation to direct end users to the Saved Items management page. We recommend adding “Saved Items” as a main navigation option at Global Settings > Navigation > Menu: 

 

After you save and publish in the Website Configuration Tool, you will see the “☆ Save” buttons on the search/browse pages and the item pages. Users can click on the Save buttons to save an item to their Saved Items page or click it again to remove the item. 

 

 

If the item page is displaying a compound object, the Save button operates on what’s currently displaying, either the parent object or the current child page. This gives users the flexibility to save individual pages within a compound object, which is especially useful for compound objects with hundreds or thousands of pages. 

To see the list of currently saved items, go to the “Saved Items” page found at /digital/saved in your CONTENTdm website. The items are sorted in the order that they were saved. On the Saved Items page there are 3 action buttons on this page: Remove, Create Link, and Export. These operations will apply only to those items that are checked when the button is clicked. 

 

When you click Remove, any items that are selected will be removed from your “Saved Items” page. 

When you click Create Link, you will build a permanent link to the items that are checked. The URL will include some random characters and you have the option to append custom link text to describe the items. You cannot modify the set of items for a link after the link is created. If you want to share a different set of items, simply create another link. Note that you cannot retrieve a created link once you have closed the dialog box, so be sure to save or bookmark it. 

  
When you click Export, you can choose to save a Plain text file or a Simple HTML file. These files will be downloaded to your local device and can be emailed for sharing with others. 

 

 Note: The Public URL defined in Website Configuration Tool > Global Settings > Analytics & SEO > Public URL is used to generate links in the exported files. Make sure your URL does NOT include a "/" at the very end for the links to work properly in the exported files (even though the example URL has it).

The fields for display (list view) on Saved Items page, shared link page, exported .txt and .html files all follow the search/browse page display, which can be set in Website Configuration Tool > Global Settings > Results > Choose fields for display and order they appear in.

You can add up to 200 items to your “Saved Items”. 

If you save restricted items in your list and share a link (or exported file) to those items, anyone viewing that link will not be able to see those items unless they also have access rights to view them. 

Items added to the “Saved Items” page are kept in the browser cache of the local device. If you are working on a public computer, you should use Remove to clear all saved items before you leave the machine. You can also clear saved items by deleting the browser cache. 

JavaScript lifecycle events have been added for the "Saved Items" and "Shared Items" pages. If you have customizations created for all pages of your site then you should add the new lifecycle events so that your customizations work on these pages as well. See List of JavaScript lifecycle events for more information. 

Home page image collection cards with hover effect

This recipe changes the way collection cards are displayed on the home page. The representative images are much larger, and the captions are shown only on hover or when clicked on a touchscreen device. Note that this recipe requires that you upload larger images in the Website Configuration Tool. You can see a live example here. This recipe gives you one example configuration (fonts, colors, effects) but you are encouraged to adjust the CSS file to suit your preferred visual style.