Based on suggestion of AS in Tuesday meeting, spent time on Tuesday and Thursday reading through the source code for dataverse plugin. Unfortunately, I'm unable to actually use the plugin as I don't have an account with the dataverse service, so I've been looking at the code while reading the end-user docs about features and capabilities.
November 4, 2014
In advance of conference call with NB, AS and SDW described a couple of specific use-cases (e.g adding additional fields to the Journal Setup process) and got some feedback from AS.
During call on Tuesday confirmed that intervening/interjecting in the workflow and particularly the workflow management is complicated (as compared to adding an external resource or replacing a given feature with a customized one via plug-in). Agreed with AS that the actual mechanics of the open-review process are outside the scope of my work. My work is allowing Journal Manager to specify that a journal allows open review, provides info and a link to that review and allows editor to report result of open review to OJS.
AS suggested dataverss plugin as having a number of characteristics similar to what we propose.
October 27, 2014
Met with MS to review and edit the student submission of marked-up images and plan the sequence and intro for the projected website. I'll do further work on this next week.
October 23, 2014
Retrieved 7 tasks for project proposal and mapped how those relate to what I've learned so far and to what degree I have a clue how to address each of the 7. Don't yet see how I could use the plugin/hooks/eventHandler architecture to modify the Manager / Journal / Setup pages, also not yet clear how I can set what amounts to a state variable (i.e. "this is an open review" journal) and then call that up later and use it to affect what happens on a page. Haven't fully thought through the implications of the proposed open-review workflow how on configuring the workflow which of course assumes the workflow of the peer review (e.g. copyediting and similar roles, requirement for document file for original submission and for amended submission ready for publication, etc.)
October 22, 2014
Spent most of the day reading through http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/docs/technicalreference/2.1/ in particular the sections on Plugins to try and figure out to what degree the changes I have to make can be accomplished through plug-ins. Not sure yet whether the event handling infrastructure will allow me to modify the GUI elements (e.g. in the Manager/Setup area and in the Author/Submission/NewSubmission area. Also spent a bit of time looking through the Smarty documentation at http://www.smarty.net/docs/en/ . I don't think I'll need to know very advanced stuff for that, other than possibly how to implement conditional blocks based on php variables set elsewhere (namely in the code I add).
I may try creating an absurdly simple plugin that simply plunks some content into the appropriate place in the appropriate template file (i.e. rather than me modifying the file in the base code) as a start.
October 20, 2014
Found JournalSetupStep2Form.inc.php which calls on step2.tpl for GUI elements and manager.xml for localized strings. Managed to add an H4, p and H3 elements and get the localized strings.
Tried adding a textarea and got the text area, but did not get the FCKeditor-like wrapper. Presumably, somewhere I have to add the id of that textarea to a list of elements that need to have the fck-editor stuff wrapped around it.
Started on the developer's documentation.
Specifically the technical reference at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/docs/technicalreference/2.1/
and the API reference at
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/doxygen/current/html/index.html
October 17, 2014
Wednesday. Started reading through the developer documentation and the code in my OJS instance. First objective is to modify the Journal Setup section by adding form elements explaining the Open Review option (similar to those used for Peer Review already on that form). File is classes/manager/form/setup/JournalSetup2Form.inc.php , but that just invokes a bunch of methods to generate the page. I did find locale/en_US/manager.xml which contains all key-value pairs for text strings in the interface, and added two entries "manager.setup.openReviewPolicy" and "manager.setup.openReviewDescription". I haven't yet figured out what invokes those keys.
October 14, 2014
Installed a copy of OJS from their site into my account on hcmc/home1t with backup of those files on my Mac.
Separately, downloaded the ojs and pkp-lib repositories from their github site. Not sure I'll ever do anything with those, but I've got them just in case.
Plan is to do investigative work with my autonomous copy (have a backup of the tar.gz file so that I can expand that and compare with changes I've made) so I'm not constantly having to deal with whatever changes they're making. Then I should be able to either manually migrate those to my copy of the github repo and then PKP can deal with them from there, or come up with some other way of getting my modifications to them.
October 3, 2014
AC reported that images of page scans were no longer appearing on the VPN site.
Due to the recent shellshock issue, a number of virtual domain names no longer function. In themes/VPN/vpn-single-record.php there were links to image files on www.tapor.uvic.ca and that's one of the virtual domain names that was being listened for on a server that we had to bring down. So, the URLs for the image files based on that domain name stopped working. I edited the file to change the instances of www.tapor.uvic.ca to hcmc.uvic.ca and since that virtual domain is listened for an a still-live server, the image files appeared again on the site.