Editing Repository configuration (section)

==XML Config Files in EPrints==
This section contains some general information about the XML archive config files: template, phrases, ruler and citations. metadata-types.xml uses XML but these comments do not apply.

===XHTML===
These files use HTML elements (and other elements too). XHTML is a fairly new version of HTML which is backwards compatable with HTML 4 but written using XML, not SGML. This means that it is much stricter but less ambiguous and easier to parse and modify. Assuming you know HTML, the main differences are as follows:

; All tags must be closed : All elements must be closed, even ones such as &lt;li&gt;. Tags which do not have a close tag in HTML, like <tt>&lt;br&gt;</tt> or <tt>&lt;img src="foo"&gt;</tt> still must be closed eg. <tt>&lt;img src="foo"&gt;&lt;/img&gt;</tt> - this can be abbreviated as: <tt> &lt;img src="foo" /&gt;</tt>
; All tags and attributes must be lower case : Self explanitary.
; Strict definition of what tags may appear within others : Not actually checked by EPrints. It will let any rubbish past as long as it's valid XML. But that's no reason to be naughty.
; All attributes must be wrapped in quotes : In HTML the values of attributes do not have to be wrapped in quotes, but in XML (and therefore XHTML) they do.
; All attributes must have a value : In HTML some attribues do not require a value, for example <tt>&lt;hr noshade&gt;</tt> In XHTML it is represented as <tt> &lt;hr noshade="noshade" /&gt; </tt>

So in summary, the HTML:
<code>
 &lt;img SRC=someurl&gt;
 &lt;hr NOSHADE WIDTH=2&gt;
 &lt;P&gt;Foo bar&lt;/P&gt;
</code>
should become in XHTML:
<code>
 &lt;img src="someurl" /&gt;
 &lt;hr noshade="noshade" width="2" /&gt;
 &lt;p&gt;Foo bar&lt;/p&gt;
</code>
And that's more or less it. See http://www.w3c.org/ for a complete description.

===Language specific files.===
phrases, templates and citations have one instance per supported language. This allows the system to generate pages and emails in more than one language. Supporting a new language will require translating all the english config files currently shipped. If you do intend to do this (lots of work!) please get in touch with the eprints admin so that we can avoid duplicated effort.

===Extra Entities===
The XML files all use a DTD which defines a few extra entities. Entities are items in XML (or HTML) which start with "&" and end with ";" like &amp;amp;. These additional entities come from the entities DTD file created by generate_entities. One DTD is created per language, although currently the only variation is the archive name.

; &archivename; : The name of the archive in the current language.
; &adminemail; : The administrators email address.
; &base_url; : The base URL of the system (without a trailing slash)
; &perl_url; : The base URL of the CGI directory (without a trailing slash)
; &frontpage; : The URL of the system homepage.
; &userhome; : The URL of the user homepage.
; &version; : The current EPrints version.
; &ruler; : The XHTML of the standard divider.
; Any XHTML character entity (since EPrints v2.1) : You may now use any XHTML character entity, eg. <tt>&amp;nbsp; &amp;eacute; &amp;euro;</tt>.
; User configured entities : You can generate your own entities by modifying the function which generates them in ArchiveConfig.pm

None of these entities are not available in the citations file or the ruler file.

===Name Spaces and XHTML===
These files contain a mixture of custom tags and XHTML. To keep these distinct the XML files contain a name space definition in the first element. The pratical upshot is that all EPrints own tags have the prefix "ep:". The namespace information is actually ignored by the current version of the eprints system.

example of mixed tags (and entities):


<code>
 &lt;ep:phrase ref="lib/session:contact"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to contact 
 &lt;a href=&quot;mailto:&adminemail;&quot;&gt;&archivename; administration&lt;/a&gt; 
 with details.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/ep:phrase&gt;
 &nbsp;
 eprints elements: phrase
 xhtml elements: p, a
 eprints entities: archiveemail, archivename
</code>