Ray Lee of UC Berkeley’s Research IT department is the lead for the CollectionSpace UI rewrite project, code-named “Drydock.” The following piece describes the state of the project after completing the first of four milestones. This work is funded by a recent grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to LYRASIS, CollectionSpace’s institutional home.
In planning out the new UI, we established four milestones over the first year, at three month intervals. The first milestone was set for the beginning of October, and I'm happy to announce that we finished it on schedule. The target for this milestone included two groups of functionality: log in/log out, and basic record editing for a single record type.
There was a significant startup cost paid during this period; about 1/3 of the time was spent updating the services layer, another 1/3 was spent on research and planning, and only the final 1/3 was spent doing actual UI development. For the next three month period, I'm anticipating that there will still be some research and planning, but a lot more actual development. We should be able to build features out pretty quickly now.
Demo Time!
A build of the new UI is running at http://nightly.collectionspace.org/drydock. After logging in, you can create a new object record at http://nightly.collectionspace.org/drydock/record/object, or edit an existing one at http://nightly.collectionspace.org/drydock/record/object/[csid]. Note that all of the fields are displayed in free text inputs. Implementation of dropdowns, autocomplete inputs, dates, structured dates, and other field components will be done with the "advanced record editing" group of functions, scheduled for the second milestone. These features are mostly spec'ed out in JIRA.
Looking Ahead
In the next week or two I'll be working on developer documentation, so that other people can start to implement forms for the remaining record types. Then I'll work on implementing advanced record editing features, sidebar components, and keyword search, which will take us to the end of the year.
We're looking for contributors. If you'd like to help create the next version of the CollectionSpace user interface, please let us know!