Greenstone Wiki

Enabling user comments

Greenstone 2 and 3 both support allowing users to add comments to individual documents. A user merely needs to have an account on that Greenstone DL in order to leave comments on any accessible document, and need not have collection editing permissions on that or any collection.

For each collection, you can decide whether to allow user comments to be added to its documents or not. By default this ability is turned off. To turn it on for any collection:

Greenstone3

Open the collection in GLI and go to Format panel > Format Features
Select the display format feature and set the value of the allowUserComments gsf:option to true, or add the option if not already present.
<gsf:option name="allowUserComments" value="true"/>
If you had already built the collection, you can Preview it straight away. Any document page in the collection should provide a link in green at the bottom labelled Add Comment. If you're not already logged in, you will be taken to a log in screen and, once authenticated, you can proceed to add a comment. Once you're done leaving comments, you can press the green Logout link.

Greenstone2

Open the collection in GLI and go to Format panel > Format Features
Under Choose Feature, select Allow User Comments
Press the Add Format button
Tick the Enabled button
If you had already built the collection, you can Preview it straight away. Any document page in the collection should provide a link in green at the bottom labelled Add Comment. If you're not already logged in, you will be taken to a log in screen and, once authenticated, you can proceed to add a comment. Once you're done leaving comments, you can press the green Logout link.

Notes:

User comments cannot be added if the GS2 server is being run from GLI. Attempting to do so will result in an error mentioning that the document or collection is locked. Run the standalone GS2 server to add user comments instead.
Users need to have an account in your digital library in order to add comments. They can register themselves as a user, or an administrator can add them as a user. See the user management pages for more details: Greenstone 3 or Greenstone 2.