Prism Release Preview – April 2010
We’re going to release the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview next week. This release will mark the completion of the four remaining Q1 roadmap items:
- Improvements in display of availability information
- Admin console
- New stock search
- Own host name
In light of the size of some changes, and because of the Easter break, we’re going to allow more time for everyone to preview the release.
The most visible change is the improvement in display of availability information, detailed on the blog back in January. This replaces the previous availability summary with a much more comprehensive and usable set of statements and can be expanded to provide item level details for each location. As with other aspects of Prism 3, the new availability can be styled to suit your needs using CSS so you can match the new functionality to your own style as you see fit.
The change also makes the reservations functionality more prominent and re-styles the ‘find more by’ functionality. As this has changed the markup of the right hand content you should check any extensions you have that put content into this area.
The new stock search feature provides a way to provide the same information as many of the Prism 2 prepared searches you run. To do this requires more data from your local systems so will mean a small upgrade to MarcGrabber, we are currently testing with a small number of customers. Please contact support if you’d like to get new stock searches set up for your catalogue.
We’ve also completed final testing on the admin console and are releasing this to an initial set of customers, before making the deployment more widespread.
The final roadmap element, own hostname, will require some consideration if you choose to take it up. Some things to bear in mind are the requirement for a security certificate for those parts of the site that contain personal details of your borrowers as well as making sure your DNS provider sets up a record for your domain. If you’d like to enable the own hostname feature then please contact your account manager who can talk you through each of the steps required.
As well as the roadmap items, this release also contains some other small fixes and changes, namely:
- The advanced search link no longer carries through the default text
- Non-latin characters/diacritics now display correctly, this was a fonts issue on Windows machines which we have fixed. If your styling specifies different fonts to the Prism defaults then you may need to review your styling also.
- Meaningful browser title for search and item pages (this makes it easier to distinguish different bookmarked searches and catalogue items)
- Special characters in searches no longer cause the search to fail
As you can see, this is a substantial release and so we would urge you all to try out the preview. You can access the preview by putting demo/ directly after the prism.talis.com address, for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.
If you have any questions on this or other issues feel free to email me phil.john@talis.com or your account manager (or comment here, of course).
April 7th, 2010 at 10:25 am
Thank goodness for a new stock search feature. We’ll be asking for this straight away and look forward to seeing how it looks/works. We like the new availability information very much although we’d like to drop the grey background it appears in – hopefully we can amend this (?). The more prominent ‘Login to request this book’ is very welcome. The only thing that now looks worse is the ‘Find more by’ section. Instead of a fairly clear, bullet-pointed list of subjects we now have a concatenated list of grey blocks with a smaller font. Why?
April 7th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Hi Chris,
thanks for the feedback. Part of the reason for altering the “find more by” is to move the feel more towards the tag-browsing approach that people expect from using other sites and emphasise the groupings and relationship to the item summary more. As it stood, the plain styling meant that section of the page tended to get ignored – so we’ve given it more “weight”. There should still be space between the items though, I’ll check to see if it’s not a specific browser issue.
What we’ll do is monitor usage patterns to verify that it is having a beneficial effect, the proof of these kind of changes is in the real-life usage.
As with all aspects of prism themes though, these are defaults and they have to be fairly neutral to work on a variety of customer’s themes. If you wish to move the styles to something more in-line with your catalogue theme, you can do so by updating your CSS.
Hope that helps.