December

Goobi viewer Digest for December 2021

Coming soon 🚀

• Changes to the search algorithm

• Cookie banner management

Announcements

Like every year, December is again a very short month for us. That's why the December release contains only minor code adjustments and bug fixes. There are no new features. That's why this digest will give a preview of what we will finish and release soon. There is also a preview of ideas we have for the coming year.

Log4j

This Goobi viewer release, like last month's patch releases, contains updated Log4j dependencies. This vulnerability has strongly affected our work in the last days of December. Goobi viewer also uses the vulnerable Java library. Accordingly, not only updates had to be provided, but also existing systems had to be updated. More information can be found in our Security Announcement in the Community Forum:

DE & EN: Goobi Security Announcement - Log4ShellGoobi Community

What will come

Fuzzy search

It is already finished, but we still want to test it: The fuzzy search.

A search for "Göthe" will then also find "Goethe". This change is after the boosting from last month now the second big innovation in the context "search algorithm". The so-called fuzzy search will be included in the January release.

Dark Mode

Again and again there are partners who want the Goobi viewer Reference Theme with customized colors, logo and font. Such customizations can usually be provided easily, because in many places we use variables in the LESS code, which are then exchanged for corresponding HEX values when compiling to CSS. Now there was another such request recently, but the request in customizing the colors was:

Please make the background black, the menu in purple and the content area in gray.

After we adjusted the LESS variables, it looked quite horrible....

For example borders: With a light background with a white box on it, it is important that these two elements are visually set off. The eye can then grab it easier better, otherwise both parts blur too much into each other. On a dark background, however, there should be no border. That doesn't look good at all and is not needed at all. When we then started to remove the borders, we noticed that we define them quite differently in LESS. As a result, they all look identical, but the notation was different, for example:

/* Variante 1*/
border: 1px; border-color: #ccc: border-style: solid;

/* Variante 2*/
border: 1px solid #ccc;

/* Variante 3*/
border: 1px solid rgba(0,0,0,0.2);

/* Variante 4*/
box-shadow...

Another example were the hover effects. Sometimes they had the color white. Sometimes they were transparent (and the background of the box was white). But sometimes they were gray.

We decided to make a virtue out of necessity and add a dark mode to the Reference Theme. Technically, two things have to happen: First, the alignment of the CSS code to uniform notation for the same things and secondly, a switch to writing CSS variables instead of HEX codes With both points we are more or less through, so that we will publish the developments in the coming year after still pending test phase.

Light view of the Reference theme

The state of the Dark Mode so far...

Backend

The Goobi viewer backend now has a uniform interface. This is strongly characterized by the blue tone in the sidebar and the topbar. The same blue is also used in the frontend in the topbar and the widget "Actions" to make administrative activities easily visible.

The advantage of the blue tone is that it is unmistakably associated with the Goobi viewer. But the disadvantage is that it always clashes with the corporate design colors in the frontend. That's why we will change the color to a darker, more neutral shade.

Further

We can't reveal everything yet, but besides the already announced areas "Cookie Banner" and "Search Algorithms" there will be innovations in the widget management for CMS pages, in the context "User Collaboration", in the management of user groups or the management of messages files. We will write more about this in due course.

What we want to do

We want to work on the usability of existing functionality. We have our eyes on the revision of the last area in the backend - the creation and management of CMS pages. After that, we want to continue with search and make changes not only to the algorithm, but also to the interface. After that, we want to gradually look for and improve other functionalities. This demand for usability will shape our work, at least for the next two years.

Version numbers

The versions that must be entered in the pom.xml of the theme in order to get the functions described in this digest are:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-core</artifactId>
    <version>21.12</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-core-config</artifactId>
    <version>21.12</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
    <groupId>io.goobi.viewer</groupId>
    <artifactId>viewer-connector</artifactId>
    <version>21.12</version>
</dependency>

The Goobi viewer Indexer has the version number 21.12

The Goobi viewer Crowdsourcing Module has the version number 21.12