digirati-co-uk/delft-static-site-generator

Generates static sites from IIIF Manifests.

delft-static-site-generator's Issues

Redesign of publication overview

The current page presenting the overview of publications was not properly designed.

Proposed improvement:

• New wireframes for this page
  • Adding thumbnail for individual publications
• Options to sort (by date/author/title) and filter (by keyword) publications
• Showing Dutch-only publications on the English page and English-only publications on the Dutch page

Desktop CanvasPanel for mobile

Currently, the Canvas Panel component 'explodes' on small screen sizes. In this mode, large thumbnails of all images within a manifest are loaded simultaneously. This causes issues on mobile phones when opening e.g. a book. Awaiting a more permanent solution, it would be good to use the desktop viewer on small screen sizes as well.

How to best deal with journals?

We plan to add many more journals to the static site, such as:

• https://heritage.tudelft.nl/en/collections/lib-tresor-th-mededelingen

These could be bundled in a collection manifest, but then the collection overview page could become cluttered with collections for each journal.

There could be a collection of collections of journals, in which each of the items points to another collection page.

Or, preferably, the object page accepts a collection of journals (sharing the same metadata), which can then be navigated like the ranges of a book (in the way Universal Viewer displays the index of a manifest or collection).

Previewing exhibitions

Current behavior

For previewing exhibitions made with the Manifest Editor users need to either submit a pull request to obtain a Netlify preview or run a local development server. For most users this is too demanding.

Improvement

An integrated or standalone exhibition viewer that loads IIIF manifests by query string in order to quickly preview exhibitions while working in the manifest editor.

New Manifest Editor compatibility

WIP

• Revising the model for exhibitions
• Implement Delft-specific behaviour controls

Changes to content folder structure

Current content folder structure:

- content
  - en
    - publications
  - nl
    - publications

Should become:

- content
  - pages
    - en
    - nl
  - publications
    - en
    - nl

Object relationships

Currently, relationships on the static site are image-based.

Some objects from Collective Access refer to other related objects.

See e.g. 'Gerelateerd erfgoedobject' at the bottom of this page: 2002.0052.CTG

How to best turn these descriptions into links? Collective Access knows the UUID of each related object and could create stable links to each landing page.

See also:

• #119

Generate IIIF Collection Manifests and deploying all manifests to static site

Current IIIF Collection Manifests consist of two types:

• Skeleton manifests such as lib-tresor-universiteitsgeschiedenis.json which do not contain any items. The static site generates the collection by looking for the Object Manifests in the corresponding subfolder (in this case /content/collections/lib-library/lib-tresor-universiteitsgeschiedenis), but does not generate a complete collection json.
• Complete manifests from Collective Access such as 64c2d30b-1002-4063-a4d0-299cb10c507e.json. For these manifests, the objects can be found in the /content/objects folder and are matched by the corresponding IDs.

On the static website, the IIIF icons link to the manifests in the GitHub repository.

Proposed improvement:

• As part of the built process, the static site generator creates IIIF Collections for the skeleton collections. The resulting jsons are deployed to the static site, e.g. heritage.tudelft.nl/iiif/collections/lib-tresor-universiteitsgeschiedenis.json
• All other Collection and Object Manifests are deployed to the static site, e.g. heritage.tudelft.nl/iiif/collections/64c2d30b-1002-4063-a4d0-299cb10c507e.json and heritage.tudelft.nl/iiif/objects/009d29e8-e196-451f-8422-265b6ff27fb1.json (with the correct CORS headers). Exhibition manifests are included and could form a separate sub-collection.
• An additional collection json is created that points to all available collections. This can be used as an API entry point.
• During the built process, the manifest IDs are altered to the URLs of the deployed manifests.

This setup offers a more stable implementation of the IIIF Presentation API and could be used for other apps that work with our collection data.

Redesign of object page

The current object pages:

• Have inconsistent zoom behavior compared to exhibitions, see:
  • #123
• Display a lot of empty black boxes on the left side if there're no relationships
• Offer no information about IIIF and possibilities, see:
  • #118
• Offer no efficient way to navigate a large manifest because of the single thumbnail row
• Offer no download options
• Do not allow to rotate pages

Proposed solutions:

• Page redesign
• Showing manifest range structures if available
• Thumbnail overview
• Download options
• Image manipulation tools in zoom window
• Option to show viewport navigator

External manifests compatibility

Current situation:

The static website is not compatible with V2 Manifests from other institutions.

Improvements:

• Ability to add external manifests as objects
• Ability to use external manifests for illustrations
  • Related to: #131
• Ability to add images from other collections as part of exhibitions

See also

• Earlier test: #98
• Manifests for testing: https://github.com/sammeltassen/iiif-manifests/tree/master/external-manifests

Redesign of mixed-media canvasses

Currently users have to cycle through each of the annotations on a mixed-media canvas within an exhibition in order to see the caption and link to the object page (if available).

Proposed improvements:

• Different placement of captions and links, maybe as part of the zoom window, rather than outside of it
• Possibility to skip the cycle and click on individual annotations to obtain more information
• Allow alternation of image and text annotations
• Skip image annotation in tour when there's only one image annotation and multiple text annotations
• Allow mp4 video annotation on canvas in combination with image and text annotations
• Add behaviour property for modal background color
• Stop scrolling main exhibition page when in modal

Presenter mode for exhibitions

Currently behavior

Exhibitions have to be navigated by individual users; there's no way to 'autoplay' an exhibition in front of an audience or as part of a physical exhibition.

Improvement

Presenter mode for exhibitions. How would this work?

• Users can click a presenter link at the top of any exhibition
• The browser will run in full screen mode
• A bottom/top menu bar allows users to navigate the slides, track progress and slide duration, and press play/pause/stop. This could include a thumbnail row. There's also a loop setting. The bar hides automatically when user is idle.
• Exhibition can be navigated with keyboard shortcuts
• Each canvas is now a separate slide that fills the entire screen (with cut corners)
• There's no separation anymore between overview and modal: each canvas is presented as a zoom interface right away
• User interaction pauses autoplay; after being idle autoplay continues
• Each of the annotations on the canvas (and their labels/summaries) are part of the autoplay sequence (viewer zooms to the respective annotations).
• Films are played for their selected duration (which can be a selection of the complete film)
• The exhibition in presenter mode can be embedded on other websites and requested through query string eg https://heritage.tudelft.nl/en/exhibitions/rise-of-a-campus?mode=presenter

Exhibition page improvements

WIP

• Remove 'read more link' on text block if no annotations are available
• Indicate video modals on exhibition overview page (with an icon for example)
• Remove fixed position of title block (needs page redesign for title placement)
• Allowing html in text blocks and captions (for links and emphasis)
• Change style of text modal (size and background color)

Redesign of collection overview

The current collection page only shows two objects side by side.

Proposed improvement:

• More efficient layout that can be adjusted
• Showing more information about the collection such as the number of objects
• Implementing sort & filter options

Redesign and improvement of publication page

A markdown with no headings fails on built (because the static site generator can not generate a TOC). Although a title has been defined in the front matter. This is why titles now sometimes appear three times on a single page, e.g. https://heritage.tudelft.nl/en/publications/delta-dies.

Proposed improvement:

• Redesign of publication page
  • Progress bar
  • Absolute positioning of title and TOC
• Accepting markdowns without headings

Permalinks versus localisation

Currently the selected language is always part of the page url, such as:

https://heritage.tudelft.nl/[en, nl]/collections/7b35ae59-1507-447a-a9ac-4641a7bf24b1

To provide stable links to an object, collection or exhibition, the following link would be preferred:

https://heritage.tudelft.nl/collections/7b35ae59-1507-447a-a9ac-4641a7bf24b1

Proposed improvement:

• The second link should either resolve in a link containing the language property, or the language property could be added as a query string.
• Stable link should be added to the pages

Consistent CanvasPanel experience

A zoom modal in an exhibition can be instantly zoomed; a zoom component on an object page can only be zoomed after clicking the + or - button.

Proposed improvement:

• Consistent UX-experience
  • Desktop
  • Mobile

Single manifest for all images in publication

Current situation:

For each illustration a separate manifest needs to be exported and linked within the markdown file. Example:

<Illustration source="KITLV-11908.json"></Illustration>
<Illustration source="collectie-nusantara.json"></Illustration>

Improvement:

A single manifest for the entire article. The static site generator would look for a manifest in the content\illustrations folder based on the path variable in the front-matter:

path: "/en/publications/tu-itb" would look for the manifest content\illustrations\tu-itb.json. Alternatively, the markdown filename can be used (usually the same).

In the markdown file, a canvas in the manifest is selected with an integer:

<Illustration canvas=0></Illustration>

The canvas label (rather than the manifest label) is used for the caption next to the thumbnail; when opening the modal the annotation label and summary are used (current behaviour).

TBD: additional layout options, in relation with:

• #124

Improved IIIF links

Currently IIIF links point to the raw file in the GitHub repository.

Proposed improvement:

• Adding an information layer about IIIF (e.g. in a pop up)
• Offering possibilities to open the object/collection in:
  • Universal Viewer
  • Mirador
  • Allmaps Editor/Viewer
• Making it easy to add new 'open in' possibilities in the code