Starter Site - Sprint Review!

[Rosie Le Faive]

Hello Islandora Folks, 

In just 2 weeks, we've made a bunch of progress in the starter site! This was a constrained sprint, to see what we could do, without:

* installing non-Drupal-security-shield modules

* any themes or new code.

It might still look a little plain. I will soon seek your consultation on creating more nuanced guidelines :) 

Take a look at what we've done! This'll be up for the rest of the week ONLY, for feedback and bug fixes. Then we hope to merge it into the starter site. 

http://159.203.45.196/

admin

1slandora$starter

Highlights include:

* Stuff to see on the front page! We massaged the "Top Level Collections" view (from a previous Open Meeting) and made it the main thing you see. ("Looks a little more like a repository?" Sure, if you've got collection content in it!)

* "Content" views under admin/content are now actually useable for Islandora! We put some structural fields, like field_model and field_member_of, as columns and as exposed filters. See Content, Media, Files, and (new!) Taxonomy Terms.  Some even have CSV exports.

* Taxonomy Term Manager and Field Reports - yet untested, but we believe will be useful for metadata management.

* Display Hints are now on the media. This one has a whole explainer document. 

* Search improvements, including making the search bar visible, configuring more facets (including EDTF Year as a facet), and creating a "Search within this Item" view (which searches within all descendants of the item, no matter how many layers deep). 

Full list of changes is available in a spreadsheet. Documentation will be updated shortly.

GO TEAM!

My most enthusiastic thanks goes out to the team who worked on this! Especially

Annie

Donald

Kirsta

Sarah

Yamil

and everyone who may have done work without letting me know who you are! And those who couldn't make it at short notice, but are interested in the long run!

There are some features just on the cusp of being included, but haven't made it yet because of timing or policy. These include:

* the "Grid vs list" view from the Install Profile, and other goodies which UTSC refactored into Advanced Search

* Better facets for Linked Agents, or for filtering entity references e.g. "Member of (Collection)"

* A hierarchical view of the repository, showing an overview of nodes and all their media and all their files. 

Next year, I think it'd be cool to have some thematic sprints to try to address certain issues (from layout to metadata to preservation to IR). These will be times where we gather a team to sort out or implement something more complex. Normal fixes and improvements will be going on and are always welcome too! 

Rosie

[Yamen Saleh]

Hello Rosie

Great work.

I tried to login using the credentials you shared, but it is not working

--
For more information about using this group, please read our Listserv Guidelines: http://islandora.ca/content/welcome-islandora-listserv
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "islandora" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to islandora+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/islandora/f02d8d57-311a-4454-a2dc-5f0d1b53a579n%40googlegroups.com.

--

Yamen Saleh

[Rosie Le Faive]

Thanks Yamen! 

You're right - the correct password is 1slandora$tarter

So sorry about that!

[Noah Smith]

I’m glad the sprint felt successful and made progress with the starter site. My concern is product/change management and ensuring a smooth upgrade for existing sites for things like flipping the display hint onto media: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CQkiznH-q-2eQSuPIRrl47Biho1mrDegbc4KaIA8SBY/edit#heading=h.wcgr2ziu8f3y

Changes like this can fracture our community (are you a pre-“display hints on media” site or “post”? do you have resources necessary to make this update, especially if/when there are bugfixes you really need bundled into the same update? or if there’s no code/data update needed, there’s at least a documentation problem where early sites will have been configured one way and new docs will no longer be correct unless they are written to include both variants) unless they have update hooks to accomplish what needs to happen. It is VERY EASY to get changes like this accepted in our current workflows (a friendly person or two at other institutions can merge any PR) without update hooks and the downstream impact to existing sites can be very disruptive.

I’d just like some assurance that these conversations are happening, and that there is a person or a group who feels responsible for ensuring that nothing gets merged without a clean, built-in upgrade path. Could we add this formally to our PR acceptance process? We'd be happy to help support such a process since we know that this sort of change will impact existing sites, and I suspect other institutions with sites in production are ready for this level of engagement/process as well. Feels like we're ready to step into a new era of Islandora 2.0!

Thanks in advance, ~Noah

[Rosie Le Faive]

WHOA!

Where on earth did you get the idea that Islandora was responsible for that?

We (the foundation/community) make software - the drupal modules that are versioned with semantic versioning so that you know what to expect when you are updating.

We (the foundation/community) provide examples using the software. You can set it up like this. Or however you want - our tools are configurable.

What we have never, ever, offered to do is the following: Switch out your live configuration on a running site with some that we think is "better".  WE WRITE SOFTWARE, BUT DO NOT RUN YOUR SITE. WE ARE NOT A VENDOR.

If you want to:

• remove modules from someone's site because you think it's not being used (obviously not without storing the data elsewhere or confirming with the site owner?)  (`name` module, islandora_install_profile_demo_core_update_8206. `entity_log` module, update 8233)
• claim complete ownership over what fields are indexed in solr and how, and how the search view works and what facets show up (update 8210, update 8226), basically preventing site owners from having any control over their content's treatment
• Further dictate what metadata fields a user can have, and which ones show up where (all 'manage display's rewritten in update 8215)
• Control what's in everyone's "home page featured collections" view (update 8208)
• Insist that everyone uses a specific theme (update 8203)
• Inject content into the site without the consent of the site owner ("terms of use", update 8212)
• Administer block placement (8216)

then that is UP TO YOU, AS A VENDOR. I hope that your clients understand this, as part of their contract. But as a foundation making open source software, we do so with the assumption that the implementer takes responsibility for setting it up how they want it. The starter site is only that: pure default setup. Assistance. You are mistaking Islandora+starter site, which is like a car with lane detection features, and selling it as though it is a self-driving car. I think it's fine, but you need to realize that you just defined yourself as a chauffeur service.  

We provide:

• Software with versions managed by semantic versioning
• a demonstration of how it can be used
• some tools to help spin it up

What you are asking for is this:

You buy some furniture from IKEA. The MALM dresser looked nice under the fake window in the showroom, so you put it there. But then a staff member at IKEA decides no, let's restyle this room and put it by the fireplace. So the dresser in your room is automatically moved by the fireplace, crushing the dog who was sleeping peacefully by the fire. Now your living room on top of latest IKEA fashion again (except for Rover's brains seeping into the TOFTLUND rug). 

I listed seven categories of dog-crushing behaviour that could happen if we don't treat the starter site as a SHOWROOM. Our philosophy, the only one I think makes sense, is that once you take it home, it's yours to do what you want with. That's the deal between open-source software creators and users. It's not PHP's responsibility, when they release a new array format, to go into all your code and rewrite it. There are other helpful software tools that do that (FYI). But for some reason you're not mad at PHP for introducing a new option. Or even at Drupal for making it part of their standard. So why are you so bothered that we're offering a new way of doing things with the same software? 

Regarding documentation.

The more we leaned into Drupal, the more we had to move away from the idea that "islandora" controls how your site works. There are so many options for how you want to ingest/display/derive your objects! The methods that we chose are:

• well-known and trusted
• configurable
• what we were able to configure with the resources at the time.

But we can't limit you to only ever using what we came up with!! We can't predict all your use cases and make something work perfectly with zero configuration. That's why it will help us to have more transparent configuration - fewer mysterious and opaque and mystic behaviours and more obvious, understandable, normal Drupal. Islandora, as part of Drupal, offers implementers incredible power and control over what goes on in their repository.

The idea that we're trying to move away from is that islandora is an opaque and monolithic setup. Islandora 7 was like that. I know, some people find it fine. But that is incompatible with all the design choices we made in this version - being more closely coupled with Drupal, re-using Drupal entities, being very modular - these are all things that are good, and make us better Drupal citizens, and make our users better Drupal users. And they mean that our users need to become better at Drupal, too.

We can document what our modules do. We can document something about how the starter site or sandbox work at any given point in time. But documenting how your site works? Hon, that's your responsibility. 

If an institution does not want to wield wizardly power and control over a drupal site, they will probably be better suited by either: a vendor who provides Islandora-with-constraints, or, a different repository system. That's fine. There are other software projects in that niche. 

[Luke Taylor]

Rosie, I am very appreciative and supportive of your work on the starter site. It provides an excellent way for people to get started with Islandora, who are trying to set up a site themselves.

It is also great that you have documented the setup for “View Mode Switcher” so that folks can set it up on an existing site if they wish.

Noah/Rosie: It might be helpful for the community to have an agreed-upon procedure around when automated upgrade paths are appropriate. I am sure we can come up with something we can all agree on. I’ll bring this to the next TAG meeting.

[Noah Smith]

Thanks Luke. I am looking forward to sitting down and working with everyone towards common ground. I know we all have a shared goal of ensuring Islandora’s success. I would like to join the TAG conversation when this topic is raised, but unfortunately I have Jury Duty on Wednesday 1/11. Could this topic please be deferred until I can join on 2/8?

[Rosie Le Faive]

Thank, Noah and Luke. Feb 8th sounds good. I'd be happy to talk about it then.