Fields for arbitrary links [#261848]

Hi,
I'm quite confident with biblio so far :-) I've even created my own style and hooked into theme_biblio_list from our own module and everything looks very nice :-))

Just one thing we are missing and I wonder if you would consider adding this:
We always have some (more or fewer) links at the end of every publication in the biblio list. They could be any kind of href, i.e., downloads, links to the Journal, links to a html version of the paper, either at our site or at e.g. Springer etc. So an entry in the list could look like:

Frank Steiner, My silly paper, in proceedings of some weird conference, 2007.
Available: (PDF) (HTML) (Abstract) (Conference Proceedings) (Article)

I can let user enter arbitrary hrefs in a custom field and parse the content from there. But they could add every kind of (wrong) html code there, so it would be much nicer to have kind of a "Links" field in biblio, that would consist of an arbitrary numbers of lines (like with the contributor fields) with two rows each, the first row "Text" and the second "URL". So I would enter into these fields:

Parsing such a structure from a style or theming function would be very easy. And it would biblio also make compatible with webfm because you could just paste webfm hrefs there and didn't have to use the drupal attachments for downloads.

I don't feel I can add such a structure at the moment because it would change the mysql structure of biblio entries and I don't know how to e.g. upgrade existing repositories etc.

So, do you think such a structure would make sense and if yes, would you consider adding it some time?

Comments

Comment #1

rjerome CreditAttribution: rjerome commented 23 May 2008 at 12:35

Separating out the URL's to another table was in the back of my mind also, so I guess the answer is yes, this is a feature which could be added. I guess the only comment I had when looking at your suggestion is the issue of consistency in naming if you have just a text field for the title. Some might enter "PDF" while others "pdf" or "Adobe PDF", but if that's not a concern then it is certainly the easiest way to go.

Ron.

Comment #2

Frank Steiner CreditAttribution: Frank Steiner commented 23 May 2008 at 13:36

Wow, that sounds great, thanks for considering!

I guess having a textfield for the title gives you most flexibility. I just looked at the publication list of our chair and found that every of our research assitants takes sth. different for the anchor text. Just the PDF files for the papers were linked as "PDF, Download here, Read, Published Version, .pdf..." and so on :-) And then we have all the other links, e.g. people sometimes link with the OID or "Journal Paper" or "Published as LNCS" as title and the paper at springer or lifesciences as href.

So I guess one should be able to use anything as title, just like you would do when writing a href/anchor.

Btw, I'm really impressed how open-minded you handle all the feedback and user requests you get here. This module is really excellently maintained!