Site, interfaces, and libraries
Sites and interfaces contain the content and presentation information, respectively,
for the digital library.
A site is comprised of a set of collections (and possibly some
site-wide services). A site can be seen as a collection of collections.
You can have multiple separate sites in a single Greenstone3 installation.
An interface is a set of images (and, potentially, CSS and Javascript) along
with a set of XSLT files used for translating XML output from the library into an appropriate form –
HTML generally. XSLT (and therefore every Greenstone interface) is built around things called templates, which will
tell Greenstone how to display pages depending on the content for that page (e.g. a document's metadata,
the names of the collections in your site, what browsing classifier have been defined, etc.).
If all of that sounds really confusing, don't worry!
Unless you want to make extreme changes to an interface (or define your own),
you can largely avoid XSLT.
While the interfaces (i.e. the files that dictate how each page looks) themselves are separate from the content, you can override any part of
the interface on either the site or collection level. In fact, Greenstone3 provides some features to
make modifying or overriding an interface easier:
You can create any number of interfaces in your Greenstone3 installation, which is especially useful for when you want to
present the same content in different ways. For example, you may want to provide two interfaces
for your sites: one interface for visitors using computers and another interface for mobile users. In addition,
multiple sites can make use of the same interface.
Finally, every site-interface combination you create is considered a library
(in technical terms, each library is actually a servlet).
Collection level vs. library level
Customization can be done at either collection level or library level. Any changes made in the GLI
will only effect the current collection (though, you can copy formatting into future
collections by basing them on another collection). Other methods of customization can be
enacted on a collection or library basis.
Format Statements
The
content of a Greenstone collection is handled by
format statements,
which can be modified in the GLI (under
Format → Format Features). So, if you want to change how documents appear
in browsing pages, search results, and on individual document pages, format statements are where
to make changes.
Macros
Greenstone2 is built on macros, which look like _this_ and basically stand for
a block of text or code.
