code4libbers,

Have you ever worked with Greenstone, the open-source collection hosting 
solution Greenstone?  Ever try to do anything more that superficial 
customization of the interface?

Have you ever held your breath, waiting for someone's reaction when you 
nonchalantly send a link to a page of your collection (in the 
pre-tinyurl days) looking something like

http://emeraldview.tourolib.org/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?e=d-00000-00---off-
0demo--00-0----0-10-0---0---0direct-10---4-------0-1l--11-en-50---20-
about---00-0-1-00-0-0-11-1-0utfZz-8-00&a=d&c=demo&cl=CL1
&d=HASHa891721179ce8bc74b905a.6.1

We needed the proven Unicode support of Greenstone, but shuddered at 
this and similar issues arising out of the antiquity of Greenstone's 
codebase.  [cue triumphant music]  So we set out to create: EmeraldView! 
a new lightweight (for now) PHP frontend for Greenstone, using the 
CodeIgniter framework.  The above URL becomes

http://emeraldview-demo.tourolib.org/greenstone-demo/
courier-n-160-nov-dec-1996-dossier/6/1

Happily, Greenstone collections can be configured out of the box to 
build using Sqlite for metadata storage, and Lucene for indexing, as 
opposed to default MG or MG++ [http://www.cs.mu.OZ.AU/mg/].  This makes 
it surprisingly easy to tap into the backend.  Using EmeraldView 
requires no modifications to the native Greenstone code; it simply sits 
on top.

Theming and i18n/l10n are supported, though we're still working out the 
details.  Check us out at http://emeraldview.tourolib.org/ - there's a 
demo there which reflects our current stage of development.  (We don't 
have a designer working on it yet, so it still looks rather brutish.)

We'd love to hear your suggestions or Greenstone hacking stories.  You 
can checkout the code using
$ svn co https://svn.tourolib.org/emeraldview/trunk dest-dir

Cheers,

-- 
Yitzchak Schaffer
Systems Manager
Touro College Libraries
33 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10010
Tel (212) 463-0400 x5230
Fax (212) 627-3197
Email [log in to unmask]