Quickstart:Customise EPrints

This page assumes you have completed the previous pages in the Quickstart Guide.

What does Customise Mean in EPrints?

There are lots of ways you may want to customise EPrints, this page aims to help you understand what those ways are, and direct you to resources to help you achieve those changes.

Concepts

When changing your EPrints system, there are a few concepts its helpful to be aware of before you begin.

Archive

Your Archive is the directory created in /opt/eprints3/archives/. This holds your configuration and files that override default functionality as well as the physical location of content stored in the repository.

Phrases

Text in EPrints is designed to be customisable by admin users. To achieve this, placeholder references are included in templates which then load the content entered by an admin.

Phrases have various purposes. One is to ensure consistent use of terminology throughout the archive. It also essential for supporting multi-language archives. They are used for defining all metadata field names and their help texts.

A prominent example of a phrase is an archive's name which is appears in the archive directory's cfg/lang/en/phrases/archive_name.xml, as follows:

<epp:phrase id="archive_name">Example Archive</epp:phrase>

Citations

In EPrints repository software, a citation means something slightly different from what it means in research publication.

EPrints has files which describe how to generate the text string, not just for eprints records but also other data objects, which we refer to as 'Citation Style Files' (Citations). A data object may have different citation files for different purposes and each object may have different citation files. These files can be found under lib/citations/, flavours/pub_lib/citations/ and the archive's cfg/citations/ directory.

See here for more information about the citation formats.

Site Look and Feel

To make an EPrints Repository feel like your own, you will want to change the look and feel of different parts of the site, below we detail where different parts are controlled and link out to more in depth guides on how to achieve these customisations.

Templates

Site Templates

EPrints has 'Global' templates used to wrap page content, generally these contain your header and footer and little else (you can of course add anything you want!). There is one used for public facing pages, and one for back end pages giving the option for a different interface for admin actions. Often these two templates are identical, even symlinking one to the other.

Both templates can be found here:

/opt/eprints3/archives/ARCHIVE_ID/cfg/lang/en/templates/

(make sure to replace ARCHIVE_ID with your archive name, the name of the directory you created in /opt/eprints3/archives/)

(if they're not, copy them from /opt/eprints3/lib/templates/ into the directory above (which you may need to create))

File Names

The public template is default.xml.

The back end template is default_internal.xml.

Custom Files

As well as the template files, you may want to have custom CSS or Javascript that is used across the site and images included on various pages.

CSS

Your CSS styles should go in /opt/eprints3/archives/ARCHIVE_ID/cfg/static/style/auto/zzz_local.css.

You can create additional CSS files if you need.

Note: Files are loaded in alphabetical order, hence the zzz_ prefix.

Javascript

Your custom Javascript should go in /opt/eprints3/archives/ARCHIVE_ID/cfg/static/javascript/auto/90_local.js.

You can create additional .js files if you need.

Note: Files are loaded in alphabetical order, hence the 90_ prefix.

Media

Images for your site should go in /opt/eprints3/archives/ARCHIVE_ID/cfg/static/images/.

You can then load your images from http://ARCHIVE_ID.your_domain_here.net/images/EXAMPLE_IMAGE.jpg eg: https://demo.eprints-hosting.org/images/eprintslogo.png

Find Out More

You can find out more in our templating guide, Branding with Confidence

Functionality

Views

A View in EPrints is a page for browsing the repository, you may have a 'Browse by Author' View and/or a 'Browse by Year' View, you can have multiple Views to accomodate how your users need to access your records.

The configuration for browse views can be found in views.pl, which by default is found under /opt/eprints3/flavours/pub_lib/cfg.d/ but should be copied to the archive's cfg/cfg.d/ for editing.

See the Browse Views Category for more information.

Workflows

First class/top level data objects in EPrints (such as eprints records or users) have a workflow to allow the metadata they store to be edited via a sequence of forms.

The most common workflow is for the eprint data object. By default the configuration for this workflow is written in XML and can be found in default.xml in /opt/eprints3/flavours/pub_lib/workflows/eprint/. If this needs to be modified it should be copied to the archive's /opt/eprints3/ARCHIVE_ID/cfg/workflows/eprint/ directory before editing.

Explanation of the various elements and attributes are described in the workflow format guide.