We have updated the technical information page. One can download the complete RC source code here:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/technical-information.

The update to PHP7 was completed over the weekend of 20 Oktober.

Apart from bringing code up to date, there have also been several optimisations added (improved indexing) which should further improve performance. The increase in speed will be most notable in the editor and user lists (administration).

• Media that doesn’t exist is now displayed with a placeholder image.
• When deleting media, user will be promted to confirm.
• The editor checks for problematic Word doc names.

The RC frontpage and profile pages have been adjusted to optimize their display on smaller screens.

There is a new type of exposition editor available, which is specifically aimed at the creation of expositions where text is the main structural element. Another important aspect is, that the resulting exposition page is responive and thus easier to read on mobile devices. The editor was made on request and with financial support of the Norwegian Academy of Music.

The editor itself consists of a text field on the left side, and a live preview of the result on the right side. Different varieties of media (audio, video, pdf) can be uploaded through a single button (or even dragged and dropped into the drag-and-drop area).

The difference between the graphical editor and the text editor, is that the text editor uses text at the input, instead of graphically positioning objects on a canvas. The text format used is Markdown. Markdown is a widely used, easy-to-read, easy-to-write syntax for formatting plain text. Prior knowledge of Markdown is not required, you can also use the editors buttons to insert the correct formatting.

A table of contents is automatically generated, based on the headers present.

Because the source is simple text, we have also been able to provide import and export for a wide variety of formats (Word, pdf, html, text, odt, markdown).

The documentation of the editor can be found here.

We are currently working on upgrading to PHP 7 and we are in the final testing phase. We are very much looking forwarding to realising the upgraded version soon. There will be some major performance improvements….stay tuned.

As of 25th of May this year, we have made some adjustments to the RC to make sure we are complient to the requirements of the EU GDPR directive.

We have also updated the information on our privacy policy, which can be found here:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/portal/privacy

One of the main developments this year has been the redesign of the workspace editor. We reorganized settings and functionalities and created a more intuitive and cleaner looking layout. It is possible to sort and search media files in the panel on the right hand side. This panel can also be collapsed in order to make workspace presentation more similar to final presentation of the exposition. There are now links to guide and the video tutorials in the editor as well as tool tips. The tool history is also back and there is a new settings called “Show tool borders”, which controls the display of outlines of tools. This makes it easier to locate empty tools.

We have migrated the old JAR 0 and 1 expositions to the current RC. These expositions were still in an old RC format, that required us keeping up a secondary copy of the system. Now that the migration has been completed this will open up the possibility of updating the underlying frameworks

We have a new github account that contains source code related the RC (including this blog): https://github.com/SocietyForArtisticResearch. We will soon move the text-based editor to this account as well.