Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Typo3 Extension for BibSonomy available

Typo3 is a popular open-source content management system, used by a large number of private and corporate websites. It offfers among others a generic extension architecture, which enables developers to add custom functionality to Typo3-based websites.

For many websites in academic contexts (e.g. personal homepages of researchers, universities, research projects, ...), an important building block is an up-to-date publication list. Maintaining these lists manually is a tedious task; in order to ease this process, we have developed a versatile BibSonomy Typo3 Extension! The core concept is to keep all references cleanly stored inside BibSonomy (leveraging all useful BibSonomy features like import from different formats, scraping services, ...) and to generate automatically a publication list from this data. Have a look here what it can look like:
In order to set up such a nice publication list with the BibSonomy Typo3 plugin, you need to follow these simple steps:
  1. Store the relevant publications in BibSonomy
  2. Install the BibSonomy Typo3-Plugin in your Typo3 installation (Download it from here)
  3. Configure the plugin (e.g. select which entries to display, select the layout, ...)
  4. You're done! :)
For each of these steps we have written an extensive online documentation. Our plugin is already part of the official Typo3 installation of the University of Kassel! We offer a number of predefined standard layouts (Harvard, DIN1505...) for formatting the publication lists; in addition, it is possible to use customized layouts based on a JabRef Layout Filter.

Apart from publication lists, the plugin is also able to display tag clouds which can be embedded into websites to visualize e.g. research interests of a group or an individual. We hope that this plugin is another step towards making BibSonomy more useful for you in the process of managing bibliographic data in an integrated and unified way. The BibSonomy team is of course also open to comments and suggestions!

Best,
Dominik