The BioPortal team is happy to announce some new changes that
will ease the life of those who are deploying the BioPortal UI
application in stand-alone instances. This should make it
easier for you to upgrade BioPortal as we release new versions
and lays down a framework for us to add new functionality
without breaking your installations in the future. Previously,
things like the autocomplete, found in the Jump To and Form
Complete widgets, were hard-coded to use
bioportal.bioontology.org as their AJAX back-end. That's no
longer the case.
In addition, we've begun the process to split out text on the
site that's used to explain functionality or provide guidance
into a translation file. This means that you can change the text
on many parts of your BioPortal install without actually getting
into the ERB templates. And since it's all in one file and that
file isn't under version control, upgrading should be a snap. In
addition, this will allow us to support locale-based
translations. While we don't have any translation yet -- and we
don't have plans to create any -- we would gladly take
contributions from the community.
There may be some areas of the site that haven't been split
out into the translation file yet. If you have specific
requests we can look at adding some more. This is another area
that we would gladly take some community contribution.
For more information, including specific code changes, please
see:
http://bioportal.posterous.com/bioportal-ui-now-supports-easier-deployment-a
Please let us know if you have any questions by emailing
support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. I'll be on vacation for the next week
but someone at that address will be happy to answer questions
if they have the knowledge.
Paul Alexander
Web / UI Developer
NCBO BioPortal