Customizing

From SubjectsPlus

SubjectsPlus was developed with the assumption that you wanted it to integrate as seamlessly as possible into your own site (rather than appear to be a standalone application). As such, the styling is deliberately "bare bones." To customize, or otherwise get SubjectsPlus to look like part of your site, you might try the following:

Contents 1 Basic Customizations 2 Customizing the Guide Types 3 CSS Tips 3.1 Overall 3.2 Pluslets 4 Customizing the Search Box 4.1 Voyager 4.2 Innovative Interfaces WebPAC Pro Customization Code

Basic Customizations

• Customize the file subjects/includes/header.php to have your library's header
• Customize the footer file, subjects/includes/footer.php
• Tweak the css to look the way you want. The relevant files are default.css and guides.css. See CSS tips below.
• Customize the "Search the Catalog" section of the subject display page to match your own library. The file is in assets/fixed_pluslets/catalogsearch.html
  • Customization code for Innovative Interfaces catalogs
• You might also want to customize the icons displayed in assets/fixed_pluslets/legend.php

Customizing the Guide Types

By default, three guide types are set: Subject, Course, Topic. These three types will appear as options when you create a new guide, and will appear on the Research Guides splash screen.

If you want to change these, go to control/includes/config.php. At the top of the file is an array like this:

 $guide_types = array("Subject", "Course", "Topic");

Add or remove items to this array to change the available guide types. For example, if you wanted Guide types of Subject, Topic and Events, your array would look like this:

 $guide_types = array("Subject", "Topic", "Events");

CSS Tips

Overall

The relevant file for styling the public site is sp/assets/css/default.css. The default layout has pages divided into

• rapper (centers all content, constrains width to max of 1100 px)
  • header
  • main-body
    • content (the wider main column, floated left)
    • sidebar (narrower right column (by default), floated left)
  • footer

Pluslets

Most of the public pages have the content chunked into "pluslets" which have the following form:

Thus, to style it, you need to style

.pluslet

.titlebar

.titlebar_text

.pluslet_body

• Note that the rounded edges on the pluslets WILL NOT appear in IE--they are CSS 3 features, which IE ignores. Should be okay in current versions of all the other browsers, and should degrade in IE to just regular boxes.

Customizing the Search Box

There is a pluslet to insert the catalog search box available when someone is creating a guide. If you click "New Pluslet", you should see, among other things, a pluslet called "Books: Use the Library Catalog":

You can change the file, by going to /assets/fixed_pluslets/catalogsearch.html and doing what you will. If you don't like the label, you can change that by finding the appropriate "title" field in the pluslet table in the database. It should be one of the first five items in that table.

Voyager

There is an example voyager catalog search box pluslet in /assets/fixed_pluslets/catalogsearch.html. Customize this to work in your own environment.

Innovative Interfaces WebPAC Pro Customization Code

<!-- This is the /assets/fixed_pluslets/catalogsearch.html  for Innovative Interfaces WebPAC Pro -->
<!-- Obviously, you should change the filename back to catalogsearch.html  -->
<!-- Modified for version 0.9.1.1 by Bryan Carson on 2009-10-15 -->

<form action="http://yourlibrary.innovativeopac.edu/search/" method="get" target="_blank" name="querybox" id="querybox" class="mainform" onsubmit="this.action = this.action + this.search_type.value;
 this.search_type.value= ''">
<br />
<strong>Search for</strong>

<input type="text" maxlength="800" size="25" name="search" class="search_smaller" />
<strong>in </strong>

<select name="search_type" class="search_smaller">
<option value="Y">Keyword</option>
<option value="t">Title</option>
<option value="a">Author</option>
<option value="d">Subject</option>
<option value="j">Genre</option>
<option value="c">LC Call Number</option>
<option value="h">Local Call Number</option>
<option value="g">Gov Docs Number</option>
<option value="i">ISBN/ISSN</option>
</select>


<input type="hidden" name="searchscope" value="2" />
<input type="hidden" name="searcharg" />
<input type="hidden" name="submit" value="Submit" />
<input value="Search MIDCAT" name="submit" type="submit" class="search_smaller" />
<input type="hidden" name="SORT" value="D" />

</form>