Sorry, I’ve been neglecting you, haven’t I? Time for another update then, and this one is more WYSI than most (err, ok, I’ll stop the puns).

The first part to mention is a new cut-down ‘content management system’ – when I say cut-down, I’m not just being modest. It doesn’t currently allow uploading of images or other objects, and doesn’t post to a blog or rolling new page (although now I’m starting to get ideas!). But what it does let you do is create additional pages of html that become available under a ‘pages/FILE.html’ url. So you can create a page acknowledging publisher’s that have let you archive full text of your material, for example.

If you want to access this, log in to your repository as an administrator, and then from the ‘admin’ screen, select ‘Additional Pages’ from the left hand navigation. It’s all pretty straightforward to use, but if you would like some assistance, please get in touch.

Now, editing all this html by hand is a bit tedious, right? So, related to the above is our other feature announcement – if you are using a modern Javascript-friendly browser (IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari), the ‘edit html’ form in the content management system above replaces the html entry box with a ‘what you see is what you get’ editor. If you’ve ever used software like Microsoft Word (and who hasn’t), the operation should be fairly obvious – and much easier than tedious coding of ‘pointy br slash pointy’ and the like.

But why stop there? What about all that nasty html code that you see on the homepage news editor? Or the community / collection edit pages? Well we’ve replaced the small html entry box on the news editor with a larger WYSIWYG editor – click here for an example. For the community / collection edit screens, we’ve left the small box of html code there by default, but added an ‘Add/remove editor’ link next to it, that will convert it into a cut down version of WYSIWYG editor – this time, click here for an example.

A couple of quick tips about the WYSIWYG editor – firstly, there is a button labelled ‘HTML’ on the second row of buttons. If you want to see or edit the html code, clicking that button will open a pop-up that displays the html code. Secondly, by default the editor creates new paragraphs when you hit the ‘enter’ key – and new paragraphs always have a blank line between them. If you just want to create a new line without the additional spacing, hold down the ‘Shift’ key whilst you press ‘Enter’.

One final note, a big congratulations this week to Medecins Sans Frontieres who have gone public with their repository. It’s great to see the work that’s gone into it come to fruition.