LibGuides Release 2.1.7

New month, new stuff! We’re planning on releasing yet another action-packed LibGuides release this week. Here’s a peek at what’s coming… 🙂

E-Reserves: Additions! Modifications! Fixes! This release has it all.

Oh E-Reserves…how do we love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. 

   E-Reserves Form & Administrative Area: Yup, it’s true…E-Reserves now has a super-duper-awesome form you can post for your faculty and their administrative partners so they can easily send you the info you need to populate your system. The huge, major differences from the v1 form:

   • Options for adding books (including chapters), articles, website, and media with relevant fields for each item type;
   • Option to add another item upon submission, including keeping the user / course info in place (while clearing out the item fields);
   • An “additional info” field where they can add whatever other info you may need;
   • Customizable Copyright / Fair Use Compliance statement checkbox.

   Once the form is submitted, the info is sent straight into the new administrative area (E-Reserves Requests) where you can review, add items right into your system, or deny items. If an item is added, the fields from the submission are copied directly into a new item, so you don’t have to re-type anything!

2. Editor Level Users as Course Editors: Speaking of faculty…have you ever wanted to allow them to manage their own course, but don’t really want to give them a full account in the system? Well, now you can! The Editor level user can be added as an editor to any course in your system. The course does have to exist before they’re added, but once they’re in they can add / modify items to their heart’s content…but only in the courses where they’ve been granted access.
3. Copyright Status Management: At the moment, copyright status additions are a bit of a free-for-all. After this release, it’ll be a lot more structured. Define your copyright status list; view/filter a list of all items and their statuses so you can see statuses at a glance; modify an item’s status on that screen.
4. Courses Page Additions / Improvements: The course name links directly to the manage screen instead of the public page, making it that much faster to manage your course readings. Also, when adding a new Course you have the option to copy an existing course! All info / items will be copied over, then you can modify all the things.
5. Manage Course Additions / Improvements: Simple changes here, but ones that make things more user-friendly. The course name / number are at the top of the page; new Manage Copyright button brings you to the Copyright Management area, filtered to only show items from that course; visibility dates can be set at both the Folder and Item level; Items indicate on the main course page whether or not they’re hidden from public view.

   

6. Custom Boxes Updates / Fixes: Right now, you can set custom boxes to display, but (due to a bug) they only display on course pages within guides! This update fixes that (they display on the E-Reserves homepage, course pages, and course pages within guides), allows you to choose which standard boxes (Help / Related Guides) appear (if any), and looks/works more like the Look & Feel > Pages > Homepage options, so it should be familiar.
7. E-Reserves Import: Our import utility has been created, so if you’re joining us from another system, have no fear! After you talk with our sales crew, we can import your existing content using either our JSON schema or CSV template file (along with a way for us to access files to upload). (You’ll download the schema / template from our E-Reserves guide.)

There are more ways we love E-Reserves, for sure, but man, this is a whole lot of awesome right here. 🙂

Group Modifications (LibGuides CMS)

We did some rearranging and refactoring with the Groups functionality to make things work as they should and clean things up a little.

• Group Type Name Changes:
  • Restricted with Indexing: This name was a bit confusing, so we changed it to just Restricted. This means the content is technically public and will show up in search results, but you have to either know the password or be in the appropriate IP range (or both!) to access it.
  • Fully Restricted: Again with the confusing name! So now, these groups are called Internal, because that’s their purpose: only folks with accounts can access these groups. They are not accessible unless you are logged in to your system. Think of Internal groups as internal sites where staff can log in and get guides for training, reference, policies, administration, etc. If you are logged in, you’ll see the groups listed on the public side.
• User Permissions related to Groups: We changed up how group permissions are added; we liked the way LibAnswers v2 handles it, so LibGuides v2 works in a similar way. At the Account level, you can set a user’s permission level for each group in your system; at the Group level, you can set which users have access to the group, and at what level. Admins still have access to everything, but now Regular users can be Admins of a group, have their usual Regular access, have Read-Only access, or have No Access to create guides in that group. Editor level users can be added with their usual Regular access, Read-Only or No Access. Admins: Here’s how things are account level access is going to migrate with this new functionality:
  • Admin level users: Admins have access to everything, as usual.
  • Regular level users:
    • If users had the “Manage Groups” user permission, they will be made an Admin for each group in your system.
    • If users had the “Manage Groups” user permission and Group designations:
      • They will be made an Admin for each Group designated;
      • They will have Regular access for all other groups. (Same as current access.)
    • If users do not have the “Manage Groups” user permission, they will have Regular access for all groups. (Same as current access.)
  • Editor level users: Editors will have Regular access to groups that contain guides where they’re a Guide Editor. This means they’ll have the same access as before.

  After the release, Admins can then go to either the Group Edit screen (User Access tab) or to the Accounts screen and modify any user’s permission to one or more groups.

• Guides in Internal Groups: If you add a guide to an Internal Group, its behavior will change slightly. The Sharing Restriction is enabled by default; it’s only visible on the public side if someone is logged in; Publication Status does not include Private, as these groups are basically private by default since they are Internal; these guides will not appear in the Public Content XML Export, widgets or API content.Guides in the current Fully Restricted (soon to be Internal) groups will function this way after the update.

Other Additions, Modifications, and Fixes:

• LTI Improvements: You can now set a default page other than the homepage for the Full LibGuides option; there’s a new option to embed a Single Page from a guide; the Content Box embed has a new option to remove the box header / border.

  

• CSS File Changes: Font color is now #333 (instead of #555) in boxes – it’s a little darker / easier to read; page titles are now a standard 24px (instead of 18px in guides and 36px on all other pages).
• Additional Page Templates: There are now page templates for the main Subjects (sb.php) & Profile (prf.php) pages.

• 

  Pages: Top level pages which have no content, but do have sub-pages, now automatically display a list of sub-pages on the top-level page (in public view), as they did in v1.
  TABBED NAV TEMPLATE CHANGE:
  If you have created custom templates and would like to take advantage of this functionality, you need to add a keyword to your templates: {{empty_page_sub_page_list}}
  It should go directly after <div id=”s-lg-guide-main” class=”container s-lib-main s-lib-side-borders”> and before {{content}} (or your custom column HTML).

• Fixes:
  • “Make this the default design for new guides” radio button is now “sticking” in Groups.
  • Tabbed Boxes: reordering content on a tab other than the 1st tab keeps you on the appropriate tab after saving.
  • Sub-Pages: when previewing a guide, sub-pages are now inheriting the Preview info; in the HTML backup, sub-pages are now linking to the appropriate place within the backup instead of the live guide.
  • iframe widget spacing issues have been fixed, so there are no more errors seen if you embed a box widget within your LibGuides.