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- The Simple Item Display underwent a full redesign to provide visitors with a clearer overview of available metadata and associated files.
- Item list views can now be displayed in two distinct different styles. Switching between these styles is possible with the new dspace.cfg parameter 'xmlui.theme.mirage.item-list.emphasis'
- The 'metadata' list style includes item abstracts in the listing and is suited for scientific articles.
- The 'file' list style immediately shows you whether files are attached to the items, by displaying a large thumbnail icon for each of the items.
- Based on the new restructured dri2xhtml base templates. Templates in the theme, overriding the new base templates, are located in the same folder hierarchy to ensure full transparancy.
- Automated browser feature detection for improved browser compatibility.
- In other themes, user agent detection is used to identify which browser version your user is using. Based on the result of this detection, the theme would use a different cascaded style sheet (CSS) to render a compatible page for the visitor. This approach has 2 major issues:
- User agent detection isn't very reliable
- Maintaining these different CSS files is a maintenance nightmare for developers, especially when using features from newer browsers.
- Mirage applies two novel techniques to resolve these issues
- For compatibility with older Internet Explorer browsers, conditional comments give the body tag a class corresponding to the version of IE
- modernizr is used to detect which css features are available in the user's browser. This way you can target all browsers that support a certain feature using css classes, and rules affecting the same element can be put together in the same place for all browsers.
- In other themes, user agent detection is used to identify which browser version your user is using. Based on the result of this detection, the theme would use a different cascaded style sheet (CSS) to render a compatible page for the visitor. This approach has 2 major issues:
- CSS files are now split up according to function instead of browser. style.css will now fit most needs for customization. Following additional CSS files are included, but will rarely need to be changed:
- reset.css ensures that browser-specific initializations are being reset.
- base.css contains a few base styles
- helper.css contains helper classes to deal with specific functionality.
- handheld.css and print.css enable you to define styles for handheld devices and printing of pages.
- also included In order to increase performance, concatenation and minification techniques were included for css and js files: This is disabled by default, and will need to be enabled in the configuration using the properties 'xmlui.theme.
- The IncludePageMeta enableConcatenation' and 'xmlui.theme.enableMinification'The IncludePageMeta has been extended to generate URL's to the concatenated version of all css files using the same media tag (if enabled in config).
- The ConcatenationReader The ConcatenationReader has been created to return concatenated and minified versions of the css and js files
- This is built to use the list of included css files, last modification timestamps, ... for caching purposes.
- In order to enable this for any of the existing themes, the theme sitemap must be altered as well.
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- Once js and css files have been minified and concatenated, they are being properly cached. As a result, the minification and concatenation operations only need to happen once, and do not include performance overhead.
- Caution: Note that when minification is enabled, all code-comments will be removed. This could be a problem for comments containing copyright notices, so for files with those comments you should disable minification by adding '?nominify' after the url e.g.
<map:parameter name="javascript" value="lib/js/jquery-ui-1.8.5.custom.min.js?nominify"/> - Disabled by default, these features need to be enabled in the configuration using the properties 'xmlui.theme.enableConcatenation' and 'xmlui.theme.enableMinification'
- These features can be enabled for other themes as well, but will require an alteration of the theme's sitemap.
- Javascript references are included at the bottom of the page instead of the top. This optimizes page load times in generalJavascript references were moved to bottom of page. This way pages will seem to load faster, because the structure of the page will already be loaded while the js files are being retrieved.
- jQuery and jQueryUI are included by default. To avoid conflicts the authority control javascript has been rewritten to use jQuery instead of Prototype and Script.aculo.us.
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