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WebJournal Admin Guide

Contents

1. Introduction

This guides shows how you can set up a new journal managed by the WebJournal module of Invenio. You should first read the WebJournal Editor Guide to get an overview of the main concepts of this module

2. Add a Journal

To add a journal, go to the WebJournal admin interface and click "Add new journal". Provide the name of your journal, and edit the configuration of the journal. Click "Save".

Note that by default your Apache user should not be able to save the configuration since it should not have rights to write to /opt/invenio/etc/webjournal/. To save the settings you might want to manually save your configuration to /opt/invenio/etc/webjournal/yourJournalName/yourJournalName-config.xml or give write permission to /opt/invenio/etc/webjournal/

Usually adding a journal also requires to set up a dedicated submission, give some access using WebAccess, and can optionally lead to the creation of WebSearch collections (you can, but your don't have to, map your journal categories to WebSearch collections. You can also simply create a generic collection for all articles in all categories of your journal, or don't create collections at all). See the section dedicated to articles submission.

3. Configure a Journal

You can either configure the journal from the admin web interface or directly by editing the configuration file (see above note).

The configuration consists in an XML file with the following nodes:

* Means repeatable

4. Sitemap of a Journal

A journal typically contains the following sections, each generated using a different template (as defined in your journal configuration):

5. Edit the Layout of a Journal

The WebJournal module relies on the BibFormat module to generate its output. You should then already be familiar with its concepts before reading further. In a few words, you edit the templates of a journal using HTML, and use special tags for the dynamic parts (navigation menu, article title, content, etc) of the layout.

The main differences between the use of BibFormat for journals compared to BibFormat for the formatting of bibliographic records are:

5.1 Editing Format Elements - Best practices

As said above, WebJournal format elements are not used only to format a single article/record: they are used as a generic way to provide dynamic content to your journal, such as the main navigation menu containing the categories defined for your journal, or a dynamically updated weather forecast section. As a consequence you should not use the bfo object of the format_element(bfo, ...) function to access the articles metadata, as it does not correspond to a record (see exceptions further below). You can however use it to access knowledge bases and user information.

In order to access the context of the page, you should use the parse_url_string(bfo.user_uri['uri']) function, which returns a dictionary with the keys and values:

from invenio.webjournal_utils import parse_url_string

def format_element(bfo):
    args = parse_url_string(bfo.user_info['uri'])
    journal_name = args['journal_name']
    category = args['category']
    ln = args['ln']
    ...

These values remain empty if they do not make sense in the context. For example, the recid value will be empty when displaying an index page: we are not displaying a specific article.

Note the difference between bfo.lang and the "ln" value returned by parse_url_string(..): the former represents the user-chosen language on your Invenio installation, while the latter is the more appropriate language to display the journal, based on the languages defined in your journal configuration file. Propagate bfo.lang through links, but display your article/interface using the value returned by parse_url_string(..).

Other WebJournal helper functions for format elements

The webjournal_utils.py file contains several functions that should help you work with the WebJournal module. Please refer to this file for the list of available functions.

5.2 Alert HTML layout - Best practices

The HTML "alert" (or newsletter) is sent based on the homepage ("Index" format template) of the journal of a specific issue. In order to maximize the chances for the newsletter to display correctly in the recipients mail clients, the linked CSS files are embedded into the source of the email. Because of the very varying level of support for HTML in mail clients (including web-based ones) you should check that the markup of your pages will be adequate for your targeted readers, and simply the markup if necessary.

You can include some specific markup in your "index" format template to define areas that should not be sent as part of the newsletter. Use <!--START_NOT_FOR_ALERT--> to mark the beginning of an area that should not be included in the newsletter, and <!--END_NOT_FOR_ALERT--> to mark the end of such area.

6. Submit Articles

Journal articles are nothing more than regular records having some specific MARC fields. Hence they should be entered into the system like any other record: provide a submission to your journal editors, or input MARCXML using BibUpload. Have a look at the metadata requirements of a WebJournal record.

6.1 Draft/Unreleased/Offline Articles

Since articles are just regular records, you should ensure that your readers do not have access to these records before the issue they belong to is released. Indeed, even though the articles can be hidden from the journal interface (depending on the value of the configuration variable hide_unreleased_issues), they are still accessible from the standard Invenio interface (the CDS Invenio search/browse interface is independent from the WebJournal Module, as the WebJournal interface is independent from the CDS Invenio search/browse interface)

In order to deal with unreleased articles, you can prepare a submission that can change some field of a record to flag it as "draft" or "offline" when necessary. These draft records should go to a restricted "Drafts" collection that only editors can see. Just before the issue is ready to be released, the editor can remove the "Draft" flag from each article.

A suggested setting is to map each category of your journal to both a public and a restricted WebSearch collections. For example, your "sport" category may have a public "Sport" collection, and a restricted "Restricted Sport" collection. Your submission would for example flag/unflag the "Draft" by changing the collection field 980__a based on the parameter of the submission: 980__a:myJournalSportDraft <-> 980__a:myJournalSportDraft.

One of the drawbacks of this solution is that each article has to be manually "approved" just before releasing the issue. A workaround is to set your journal configuration variable remove_keyword to value "DRAFT": that tells WebJournal to remove all occurrences of this keyword from the articles when a new issue is released. You then no longer have to take care of manually remove the "draft" flag from all these articles.
Note that this technique applies only to all articles of the released issue, but that the following tags are not affected by this removal: 100, 245, 246, 520, 590 and 700. You should therefore carefully choose your keyword so that it does not interfere with other values of your record.

6.2 Preview Unreleased Issues

By tweaking the URL, you can access the desired journal issue. Even if the unreleased issue is hidden to users, editors should be allowed to access it (See Issue Control System section).

7. Access Control

7.1 Articles Submission

Since submission is performed using WebSubmit, you can apply the standard procedures to restrict submissions of records.

7.2 Issue Control System

You can restrict access to the issue control system by using the "cfgwebjournal" WebAccess action. This action takes the journal name as parameter in order to restrict access to selected journal(s) only. A second parameter "with_editor_rights" must be set to "yes" in order for the authorized roles to edit apply changes using the interface (including sending alerts, releasing issues, etc.)
Note that this action also lets your editors change your journal configuration file (unless the file is protected on disk, which is recommended).

8. Troubleshoots

8.1 Update Cache

WebJournal makes heavy use of caches in order to optimize the serving speed. Journal editors can regenerate the journal cache, but it does not apply to old issues, or cache that has been generated by some widgets. To clean the cache, remove the files in /opt/invenio/var/cache/webjournal/yourjournal. Cached files starts with issue_year, followed by the category so that it is easy to remove the caches for a specific issue/section. Examples: 

  $ rm /opt/invenio/var/cache/webjournal/AtlantisTimes/07_2009_*
  $ rm /opt/invenio/var/cache/webjournal/AtlantisTimes/07_2009_index_News*

You might want to remove some other specific files created by some widgets, for example:

  $ rm /opt/invenio/var/cache/webjournal/AtlantisTimes/weather.html

8.2 Manage Issue Releases

Issues are usually managed by the journal editors, using the web interface. You might have to help your editors if they released an issue by mistake, or created. Have a look at the WebJournal Table Structure hacking guide to find out how you can easily update entries in the WebJournal tables.