I worked for several different projects this week.  On Monday I had a meeting with the Books and Borrowing PI and Co-I Katie and Matt and some researchers at UCL who are working on a project that deals with similar sorts of data to Books and Borrowing.  They were interested in how we developed the B&B resource and we had a good discussion about various technical and organisational issues for about an hour.  As a result of this meeting I decided to publish the development documentation for the project, which is now available here: https://borrowing.stir.ac.uk/documents/.  This includes the data description document, the requirements documents for the project’s content management system, front-end and API, plus my ‘developer diary’, consisting of all of the sections relating to B&B taken from this blog.  Hopefully the documents will be of some use to future projects.

Also for the Books and Borrowing project this week, the server that hosts the site at Stirling underwent a major upgrade and I therefore had to check through the site and the CMS to ensure everything still worked properly.  There were a few issues with the CMS that I needed to fix, but other than that all would appear to be fine.

I also began the process of updating the BARS review site for Matt.  This site is powered by the Open Journal System, but the version in use is now extremely out of date and needs an upgrade – a process that is not at all straightforward.  I spent about a day working on the upgrade and the process is not even close to completion yet.  It would appear that no 2.X versions of OJS will run on PHP 7, never mind the current PHP 8 and unfortunately my local server setup doesn’t function with anything before PHP 7.  I managed to get a version of PHP5 running on an old PC I’ve got but after copying the OJS files and database I’d taken from the live hosting onto this PC (and updating the database connection settings) I couldn’t get the site to load – all I got was a strange browser error that I’d never encountered before.

This current live version of the site is running version 2.4.3 of OJS, and the upgrade pathway states that this would need to be upgraded to 2.4.8.5 (which will then need to be upgraded to 3.2.1, which can then be upgraded to the most recent 3.4 release).  I therefore decided to try installing a fresh version of 2.4.8.5 to see if I had any better luck with that.  Initially things didn’t look good as when attempting to access the locally hosted site all I got was a fatal PHP error.  I managed to track this down and hacked about with the code to stop the error cropping up (I figured that since this version is only an interim installation it wouldn’t really matter).  After that the fresh install (with no BARS data) appeared to run successfully.

The upgrade path documentation (https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/dev/upgrade-guide/en/) states that to upgrade to a newer version you should set up the newer version and then point it at the older version’s database and reinstate the directories holding the old site’s files, so this is what I did.  The upgrade script successfully noted the older database version and the upgrade process seemed to run successfully.  At this point I then had what appeared to be the BARS site running on my old PC.  However, there were some issues.  The colour scheme appears to have been lost and there are some other differences in the layout.  But more importantly, while the journals and articles all seem to be present and correct, pressing on the ‘HTML’ and ‘PDF’ links to access the content don’t actually load in any content.  Thankfully Matt suggested that my local version of the site may need its config file updated to point to the correct files directory, and this was indeed the case, so progress is being made.

I then migrated everything onto my current PC, which currently has the PHP version set to 7, which OJS 2.4.8.5 should support.  Unfortunately it doesn’t and when I try to access the site I just get fatal PHP errors relating to functions called in the code that have been removed from PHP 7.  This is not necessarily a big issue, though, as now I have the site on my current PC I should be able to upgrade to OJS 3.X, a process I will continue with next week.

Also this week I made a few more tweaks to Matthew Creasy’s conference website and responded to a few emails that came in requesting my help with various things.  I also made several more updates to the Speech Star website, which is now actually live (https://speechstar.ac.uk/).  This included renaming the site and updating the homepage text, updating the favicon on the other Speech Star website to cut down on tab confusion (see https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/speechstar/) plus adding in a new menu item and link from this site to the other one.  I also replaced the vocal tract video found here: https://speechstar.ac.uk/speech-sound-animations/ with a newer version.

I also returned to my work on the new language search for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, completing an initial version of it.  As with the label search, the languages are listed down the left and you can add or remove them from the panel on the right by clicking on them.  Boolean options appear when multiple languages are selected and there’s an option to limit the search to compound words, exclude compound words or search for all.  Below is a screenshot of how the search form currently looks:

The search is fully operational, but is not yet live as I need to hear back from the editor, Geert, about when he’d like the new feature to launch.

Finally this week I made some further updates to the Speak For Yersel follow-on projects.  This included making a number of changes to the Welsh survey, adding in the site logos that Mary had created using ArcGIS and adding in the top-level tabs that will enable users to switch between survey areas.  I also created a new ‘speech bubbles’ animated GIF for Northern Ireland based on images Mary sent me.  The new survey areas are not yet publicly available but below is a screenshot of the Northern Ireland area, showing the logo, the top-level tabs and the animated GIF.  We’re getting there!