MePrints

For instructions on how to install MePrints, see MePrintsInstall.

Introduction

MePrints is a plugin for EPrints 3.1+ that extends the user aspect of EPrints with user profiles and home pages. Profile pages are similar to existing EPrint abstract pages, they are public-facing page providing, admin-customisable, information about the user. Home pages replace the current EPrints "Profile" page and provide, user-customisable, information about the repository so that the user can get a quick overview of all the information in the repository that is relevant to them.

The hope is that MePrints functionality will find it's way into the EPrints 3.2 trunk so that it is available to use with a new install of EPrints.

Features

MePrints brings a number of additional features to EPrints.

Additional User Metadata

A few extra default user data fields including;

• Biography - A small bit of information which is supplied by the user.
• Expertise - A list of keywords describing the user's areas of expertise.
• Qualifications
• Divisions - This uses the same hierarchy as eprint.divisions, the idea of this is to keep department/organisation for external users but divisions for internal users.

Public User Search

There is a new user search provided by MePrints, cgi/search_users, which allows you to search through users in the EPrints repository. This functionality is provided by a new plugin module EPrints::Plugin::Screen::Public::UserSearch. A user can remove themselves from the search results if they wish to by marking themselves as hidden.

Public User Browsing

4) Public user profile pages

New bin/generate_userprofiles script, generate_static() added to DataObj::User.

Repository admin can define which content (see Widgets - below) is displayed on the profile page - same for all user for consistency.

http://allaboutme.eprints.org/profile/mmr http://allaboutme.eprints.org/profile/seb

Note change to Apache::Rewrite to allow nice profile URLs

5) Internal user homepage

Replaces Screen::User::View.

This screen lays out a number of content "widgets" (currently simple 2 column layout).

Users will see a list of available widgets and add them to their homepage (like items_fields and review_fields, there will be a user metadata field for storing the user's layout preferences). Users will also be able to move the widgets around on the screen and remove widgets.

6) Profile content "widgets"

Stored in EPrints/Plugin/Widget/

Currently widgets just have a render_content method and get rendered using a Box-like surround.

Current widgets include:

• User details **
• Available user actions **
• User picture
• Latest Items in archive
• Issues with items owned by this user
• Quick Upload (creates new record in inbox)
• Most popular items (queries access dataset)

Planned widgets include:

• Latest comments (SNEEP integration)
• IRStats mini-dashboard
• Latest activity eg. recently edited items, rejected items
• .. suggestions?

• • these 2 widgets constitute the minimal information display of the current EPrints. We plan that these will always appear in a fixed position (alongside the user photo) on the Homepage and not be removable.