We're excited to announce the launch of the Activity Dashboard, which is the first of several planned features centered on making it easier to follow what's happening in a PubPub community. Members of a Community, Collection, or Pub will now see a new tab on that item's dashboard featuring a detailed, filterable log of its history. We hope this will prove to be a helpful way to keep tabs on a busy Community, where new Pubs, Members, and Discussions might be appearing all the time. Here's what it looks like:
Over time, we would like to improve this interface by adding more powerful filtering tools to find content by search term or by user, and by collapsing similar items together. But the real power of Activity is less in the dashboard and more in the new features that it will enable. By the end of this year, we also plan to release:
⏺ A notifications tray to help readers follow Discussions
⏺ An opt-in email digest summarizing Community/ Collection/ Pub activity for Members
Both of these rely heavily on the infrastructure that underlies the Activity tab. Our hope is that future features like a full-fledged review system will be able to make use of this rich timeline data to tell more complete stories about work done on PubPub.
02. Linked Images
Sometimes a textual hyperlink just doesn't cut it. Now, you can add links to images via the same image editing interface you're familiar with:
You can test out the linked images in-editor, just like you always have been able to with linked text. Captions can still contain their own, separate linked text—only the image itself will be linked by this feature.
03. Collections & Pages Block Justification
Designing pages that display collections just got a bit more flexible. You can now choose how you want to display items in Collections & Pages Blocks, with the ability to center, left-align, or add space between or around each item.
04. Cite As/Publisher
You can now add default settings for how you would like content on your community to be cited. This can be seen in Pub exports, Crossref deposits, and the citation information linked to your Pubs. This impacts all collection types that involve metadata: journals, books, and conferences. Importantly, this change also means that journal names will no longer default to your community name!
Auto-generated PDF exports will also now display the relevant citation information, including the publisher if the field is set:
For new publisher and journal citation information to appear in exports, you must trigger the generation of a new PDF by creating a new release.
05. We’ve Hired!
We're so excited to welcome Qwelian Tanner as a Software Engineer on the PubPub team! Qwelian began as a CS student at Clemson University's TRACE Lab, which focuses on human-centered computing and collective intelligence. He has a generalist approach to software development and a love for iterative learning. You can learn more about Qwelian here.
What do you think of these new features? Have ideas, feedback, and/or questions? Talk to us in our Forum, Twitter (@pubpub), or by emailing [email protected]!
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