TronProg: Programming and Computers

The new version of PhpBibliography, 1.1.1, provides a new feature: Internationalization!

2 languages, besides English, are now supported: Italian and French.

I must thank David CHEMOUIL, who opened a feature request, and provided the French translation (of course, I did the Italian one :)

Now, the phpbibliography user can choose the language using the three flags on the top right corner; switching language will lead you to the same page you were visiting but in the selected language. The chosen language will be remembered, so you can keep surfing (or editing) the site with the selected language.

Here are some screenshots:

Pubblicato da betto a 1:53 PM 3 commenti

Etichette: phpbibliography

This new release of PhpBibliography features some nice features:

1. First of all, themes are now supported so that the user can create his own theme (which will not be overwritten during phpbibliography updates), see this wiki page
2. icons for known file extensions are shown for uploaded papers (see the screenshot)
3. uploaded papers can be removed during editing
4. the action menu was improved with tooltips
5. search results can be shown also as bibtex

Pubblicato da betto a 4:32 PM 20 commenti

Etichette: phpbibliography

The brand new release of PhpBibliography is out!

PhpBibliography allows you to publish your bibliography online (and to edit it via web).
It is implemented in Php 5 and uses MySql 5 (however, it might work also with Php 4, and also with MySql 4, but I'm not testing this).

This is a complete rewriting using CakePhp , the old version site is available here.

CakePhp is really a wonderful framework and I really enjoyed using it for PhpBibliography.

Hopefully, PhpBibliography is now more stable, relying on many mechanisms offered by CakePhp, and it looks nicer (in my opinion at least).

In the near future, I'm also planning to allow customization of the look by relying on CakePhp themes.

If you have an already installed version of PhpBibliography (earlier than version 1.x) you will need to follow the instructions you find at this link.

PhpBibliography now comes with a web based installation procedure which should minimize the efforts of the user who installs it (hopefully).


These are the main features provided by PhpBibliography:

• Automatic generation of bibtex for papers (unless a manual bib item is specified when editing the paper).
• For each paper two files can be uploaded and two links can be specified.
• Papers can be searched with criteria about their fields.
• Besides standard fields, new attributes can be specified for papers; attributes can be selectable, i.e., the logged user can choose among a(n extensible) set of values and multiple, i.e., a paper can be given several values for that attribute; an example of selectable/single attribute is "Publisher", an example of selectable/multiple attribute is "Keyword", and an example of non-selectable attribute is "DOI".
  
• Papers can be specified as private (visible only to logged users).
• Reports can be generated by filtering by author, by value and by grouping up to two levels (e.g., show only papers of a given authors, grouped by year and by paper type).
• RSS feeds are available for search results, reports and paper lists.
• Lists of papers, and results of reports and searches can be included in other webpages (by using the bare layout).
• Papers can be imported from DBLP.
• Searches for possible duplicate papers.
• Papers can be inserted through bibtex items and bibtex files.

And here are some screenshots of the new interface:

Pubblicato da betto a 6:18 PM 0 commenti

Etichette: cakephp, phpbibliography

The new release of PhpBibliography is out!

First of all, this release fixes a very bad bug, discovered by Ezio Bartocci: in the merge authors procedure, the system did not check whether the two authors were exactly the same (i.e., the same id), and this used to lead to the removal of the author as the final step of the procedure, which was really bad. This is now fixed in this new release.

Concerning new functionalities:

• a procedure for trying to detect duplicate papers is now available (it can also use the SOUNDEX algorithm); this will present possible duplicate papers, and let the user select those that are actually duplicate ones;
• as for the main page, it is now possible to group papers also according to the years (an example can be found at my home page);
• by default, papers are ordered by descending year, so that the most recent papers are shown first (this should be the most common wanted behavior);
• a modification timestamp is automatically added to papers, and this timestamp is used as a sorting criterion when showing papers (the papers most recently modified are shown first)
• another desirable feature is now available: when listing papers in administration mode (i.e., when you're logged), a direct edit/delete link is always shown;
• each paper can be now marked as private, meaning that that specific paper will be shown only to logged users;
• as for the DBLP import procedure, this was improved: when there is a cross reference (typically concerning the proceeding book where the paper was published), which is separate from the paper's own bibitem, the system will merge the two bibitems, so that the resulting inserted paper will contain all the information.

Finally, in the previous release 0.5 announcement, I forgot to mention that phpbibliography makes use of AJAX technology to perform some checks during the insertion/modification of a paper through the HTML form; in particular, it shows some warning messages for possible duplicate fields (e.g., title, bibtex key, etc.) and error messages when the type of the field is not correct (e.g., non numeric years). These messages are shown right under the field, upon leaving that field, as shown in the following screenshots:


The user specifies a non-numeric year

and the system checks it as soon as it leaves that field.

The same holds for instance for the title, but this time it's just a warning (since you can have two papers with the same title, e.g., one can be an extended version):

Pubblicato da betto a 7:38 PM 0 commenti

Etichette: php, phpbibliography

It is with great pleasure that I announce this new release of PhpBibliography!

First of all, I really need to thank Ezio Bartocci, a PhD candidate of University of Camerino, Complex System Research Group, who did a wonderful job in implementing the two new main features of this release: RSS and DBLP import.

RSS

Basically, every query page now also generates an RSS link that can be used to subscribe to that specific result as an RSS feed. Of course, that feed is dynamic, so each time your RSS reader will look for updates, the system will actually run the query again. This is pretty useful to generate an RSS feed for a specific author's papers.

For instance, this is the output of my papers, and you can see the RSS link on the right that can be used to subscribe to my papers feed. As soon as a new paper of mine is added to the system, the RSS reader will catch that. And this is the direct RSS feed.

DBLP paper import

The other cool feature that Ezio implemented is the possibility of importing papers directly from DBLP, the Computer Science Bibliography, using the bibtexs of this site.

This feature is still experimental and we will have to twickle it a little bit, but it seems to work for most of the cases.

You'll be asked to insert your name and surname. After you inserted the author's name and surname,


the DBLP site will be queried and all the author's found papers will be presented to the user; the system will already check which papers are similar
to those already present in the database; if a similar paper is found in the database that entry will not be automatically selected for the import (and will be highlighted in red); the other papers will be automatically selected for import.


The user will then be able to further select all the papers to import, and
press the import button (it is also possible to select all the papers or all the papers of a specific year). Note that the procedure might require some time. Finally, you'll be able to edit each single paper imported through this procedure.


Note that the bib items of DBLP might not produce such nice paper records in phpbibliography, especially when they cross reference other bib items (also shown as a result, but not inserted in the data base); you'll probably need to modify such imported papers using the additional information in the cross referenced bib item. We are working on how to solve this little issue.

Again, let me thank Ezio once again! Not only he did a great job, but it was also very funny to work with him through instant messaging :-)

Pubblicato da betto a 6:04 PM 0 commenti

Etichette: php, phpbibliography

I've released version 0.4 of PhpBibliography, http://phpbibliography.sourceforge.net, a web based bibliography system that allows you to publish your bibliography online (and to edit it via web). It is implemented in Php and uses MySql. This is free software, open source, released under GPL.

There are many new features in this release (I hope you find useful).

First of all, you can also modify a paper by using a bibtex (previously you could only insert a new paper by using a bibtex). For this reason, the bibtexkey field was added to the database (and w.t.r. I added also the function in the admin menu to automatically generate bibtex key for papers which do not have it yet). Furthermore, you can also upload an entire bib file; this will allow you to set up the bibliography site with only one action (of course you'll then be able to modify each inserted paper).

Papers can now be classified according to several criteria (called classifications), not only by using categories. You can add new classifications, and for each classification you'll be able to add values that can be associated to papers. For instance, you can have the classification "keyword", the classification "status" with values "submitted", "to appear", "published", etc. This is very useful also for (virtually) adding a new field to the paper table structure. Classifications can be related to a specific bibtex field, so that they can be retrieved from bibtexs (and also generated in the corresponding field, during the automatic bibtex generation).

A functionality was added (available from the admin menu) that allows you to "merge two authors" that, due to a mistake, represent the same author. (This usually happens when inserting a paper through a bibtex.) For instance you have two authors Foo Bar and Foo T. Bar that represent the same author. With this function, the system will replace the second author with the first author (i.e., the second author will be deleted and all the papers that were associated to the second author will be associated to the first author).

From the paper presentation point of view some customization features were added: you can pass additional parameters in the URL (you can also specify them in the config.php file, but the ones passed on the URL will take the precedence). Here we list these parameters (in the URL they must be passed without the ,ドル using the GET passing method syntax) and their default values:

• $printfilenames = "1"
  This tells the paper formatter whether to name the link to the paper source using the complete name of the file (e.g., my_paper.ps.gz). If set to "0", then only the extension of the file will be shown (e.g., ps.gz).
• $linktodetails = "1"
  The title of the paper will link to a separate page with complete details about that paper. If set to "0", no link will be generated.
• $noheader = "0"
  If set to "1" the generated page will contain no header information (i.e., it will not even contain the css definitions). This is useful when you want to include the output of phpbibliography into another web page and you want customize it with your own css definitions.
• $paperorder
  Specify the sorting criteria of the shown papers. For the moment the only possible value for this parameter is title (meaning that papers will be ordered according to their title).

For instance, the following screenshot shows the output where printfilenames is set to "1"
while the next one shows the output where printfilenames is set to "0"
Finally, some bugs were fixed (in particular the authentication problem in php 5, due to the use of wrong variable names, see also this post on this blog).

Hope you enjoy this new version of PhpBibliography (yeah, I know, the logo is not that beauty, but that's just the beginning :-)

Pubblicato da betto a 7:13 PM 2 commenti

Etichette: mysql, php, phpbibliography

I've released version 0.3 of PhpBibliography, http://phpbibliography.sourceforge.net, a web based bibliography system.

PhpBibliography allows you to publish your bibliography online (and to edit it via web). It is implemented in Php and uses MySql. This is free software, open source, released under GPL.

The main features of the system are:

• stores all papers details in a SQL database
• handles uploads of files (e.g., .pdf of papers)
• automatically generate bibitems
• supports insertion of papers through existing bibitems
• allows paper search and filter (e.g., authors, title, keywords, etc.) mechanisms

Papers are publicly visible but can be modified only via an authentication mechanism (based on users and passwords).

Papers are all stored in a common database, and can then later be filtered according to a specific authors so that each author can show his/her own papers in his/her own page (for instance at http://www.lorenzobettini.it/papers the papers shown are collected from two different phpbibliography installations; the papers are included in this webpage by using a remote URL inclusion mechanism by specifying, in URL the filter criteria -- in this case, the filter is to show only my papers).

Pubblicato da betto a 11:46 PM 0 commenti

Etichette: mysql, php, phpbibliography

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