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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]