The development team at UPEI has been hard at work on a new release of the Islandora system, which integrates Drupal and Fedora into an extensible repository system. The latest release works with Drupal 6 and Fedora 3 and also has much improved documentation. The latest release includes:
- Customizable Collection View - Attach an XSLT stylesheet to a collection object and you can display a collection as anything from a simple HTML table-based grid to a dynamic JavaScript picture gallery.
- API for accessing and manipulating Fedora objects - Ingest new items, add datastreams, add relationships, do batch ingests all with an object-oriented PHP API designed to make accessing Fedora objects easy. No need to remember SOAP call syntax. Most API operations can be done with 2 or 3 lines of code.
- Collection Policies - Create collections and control what types of data users can add to the collection. Works with Fedora 3's content models for fine control over what datastreams new objects have. Users can easily fill out media-rich objects with consistently named and formatted datastreams.
- Plugin functionality - Dropping in a PHP class with custom ingest functions lets you automate actions to trigger on object ingest or adding a datastream. We've used this feature to automatically generate thumbnails, call out to document conversion software to generate PDFs from MS Word documents, perform Optical Character Recognition on scanned images or anything else you can access using Drupal, PHP and web services.
- XACML security policies - Islandora integrates with Drupal's users and roles so you can define which users and groups can view, ingest and manage repository items, with this security information being propagated via XACML into the repository objects themselves.
- Image manipulation API - Fedora uses Drupal's Image API to automatically scale large images before downloading them from the server. URL parameters inside IMG tags like "img src="fedora/iamgeapi/imgs:1/Image.jpg?op=scale&width=100" make accessing this functionality easy for site designers.
New developments include: additional content models distributed as Drupal modules (including samples from library and research environments); integration of the Djatoka JPEG2000 server; integrated Drupal TEI editor with side-by-side XML/image view; tighter integration with Drupal nodes.
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