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Mirage XMLUI Theme

Overall Benefits

  • Clean new look and feel.
  • Increased browser compatibility. The whole theme renders perfectly in today's modern browsers (Internet Explorer 7 and higher, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, ...)
  • Easier to customize.
  • Enhanced Performance

Technical Features

Look & Feel

  • 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
  • Makes use of the new dri2xhtml-alt, and everything which is replaced in the theme is included using the exact same hierarchy for a good overview
  • The simple item display has been redesigned give a better overview of the available metadata. The style and position of the fields were changed to better suit their contents.
  • There are two built in ways to render item lists: One more suited for a repository containing scientific papers, and one for a repository that has more of a focus on the files attached to the item instead of the item metadata. You can switch between them using the 'xmlui.theme.mirage.item-list.emphasis' dspace.cfg property. Possible values are
    • The 'metadata' list style includes item abstracts in the listing and is suited for scientific articles.
    • The 'file'
    , 'metadata' is the default.
    • list style immediately shows you whether files are attached to the items, by displaying a large thumbnail icon for each of the items.

Structural enhancements for easier customization.

  • 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. The user agent detection in the sitemap is no longer used to have different stylesheets for different browsers. Because user agent sniffing isn't very reliable, and spreading css rules about the same element over different files for different browsers can make debugging harder. Instead, for IE 
    • 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,
    , and  is
      • 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.
  • CSS files are now split up according to function instead of browser: There is a separate file for the reset css, one containing a few base styles, one containing helper classes. These files rarely need to be changed, and this leaves style.css containing only rules unique to the theme. There are also separate files for print css and other media.. 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.
  • 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.

Enhanced Performance

  • Concatenation and Minification techniques for css and js files.
    • The IncludePageMeta
    We've also included concatenation and minification for css and js files:
    • This is disabled by default, and will need to be enabled in the configuration using the properties 'xmlui.theme.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.
    • .
    • 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"/>
  • Javascript 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.
    • 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 generaljQuery 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.

Screenshots



dri2xhtml-alt

See committed source for dri2xhtml-alt here: http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo/dspace/trunk/dspace-xmlui/dspace-xmlui-webapp/src/main/webapp/themes/dri2xhtml-alt/

Configuration and Installation

The alternative basic templates has been committed, and is currently dubbed "dri2xhtml-alt".
Any of the existing themes can be updated to reference this new set of templates by replacing in your theme.xsl:

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Because the contents of dri2xhtml-alt is identical to the current dri2xhtml.xsl and its derivatives, updating any of the existing themes to reference the new dri2xhtml-alt should not impose any changes in the rendering of the pages.

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