This software is meant to be a simple way to post community databases to the web.
A Community Database
A
community database is a collection of items which
- a specific community of practice uses for actual work
- is edited, updated and annotated by central members of the community
- triggers discussion around specific elements in the collection
- and therefore makes authentic practice more transparent to newcomers by explicit organization and through rich discussion
In practice, this software is meant to allow
- Easy, Powerful Editing of the Database
- â edit in plain text right in the browser
- â include simple text formatting and images
- â use inline LaTeX for symbols
- â edit directly in LaTeX to build images of equations and whole documents
- â create embedded PDFs or multiple PNGs
- â allow different LaTeX stylesheets
- â upload documents for retrieval
- â automatically generate table of contents for complex pages
- mix in keywords and other custom data fields on the page which can be searched by field
- simply add a line of the form “Field Name = Data data data”
- Easy Powerful Search and Collection
- â personal “shopping cart” to track and process items of interest
- â export items in interesting formats, e.g. BibTeX or âLaTeX.
- â recognize and display BibTeX entries intelligently
- search within fields and over whole records
- search using boolean operations, the NEAR operator, and some wildcard
- Other Nice Features
- â set up Administrator and Editor accounts⦠anonymous edits can be turned on or off
- â add comments on items
- â Auto-discoverable RSS feed to be alerted about new additions to the database (either as a whole or specific pages)
- â Generate valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1.
- Tag Clouds and other graphical ways to analyze connections in the data
Some Examples
Be sure to check out the Quick Tour on these two sites.
BFC3 Technical Details
BFC3 is built on
Oddmuse. We heavily customized the CSS (
http://bfc.sfsu.edu/bfc.css) which we took from
Fletcher Penney and installed several standard Oddmuse modules.
- wiki.pl,v 1.863
- admin.pl,v 1.11
- creoleaddition.pl,v 1.14
- download.pl,v 1.4
- forms.pl,v 1.6
- localtime.pl,v 1.1
- mac.pl,v 1.2
- markup.pl,v 1.31
- multi-url-spam-block.pl,v 1.9
- mysearchresults.pl,v 0.1
- searchtags.pl,v 1.6a
Then we added a lot of custom-written modules, which I am making available under GPL2.
- bibtex-bfc.pl. Allows BibTeX entries to be displayed nicely and downloaded.
- cart-bfc.pl. Adds a “shopping cart” for items. Adds smart checkboxes to each item when displayed alone or in searches which update a cart cookie.
- commentcount-bfc.pl. commentcount.pl with different words and comment formatting.
- formsearch-bfc.pl. Allow searches to accept form parameters with multiple values (as in multiple selects).
- latex-bfc.pl. Allows latex documents to be displayed nicely and downloaded as latex and figures, or as a PDF.
- mysearchresults-bfc.pl. Adds hooks to Oddmuse to allow custom displays of items in search listings (e.g. LaTeX and BibTeX items have custom displays in searches).
- password-bfc.pl. Tidies up the password entry box and notably adds a link back to the referring page.
- searchpaged-bfc,pl. Makes search results come in pages with a little navigation menu.
- FCKEditor. This is a Javascript WYSIWYG editor. We’ve configured it to output wiki markup. It works well enough to, say, edit this page, but does add the occasional extra newline or odd bit of markup. It requires:
- multi-url-spam-block-bfc.pl. Altered version of multi-url-spam-block.pl, which blocks any post with a URL link. There is now an in-module whitelist (as opposed to setting one up on a per-site basis).
And here are Notes on Oddmuse Internals.
More Thoughts