SUNScholar/Theme

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Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

Introduction

The look and feel of the DSpace web site is usually one of the first considerations when evaluating DSpace as an institutional repository platform.

This wiki page provides help for the two user interfaces available for DSpace, the XMLUI and JSPUI.

In the absence of an official University website style guideline we decided to try to match the theme of the library website.
The focus of the theme was to ensure that the website was pleasant to the eye to view and that it had a somber research tone.
We avoided too many pictures and animations as these take time to load on slow connections and they use up the scarce internet data allocation of users in Africa.
We applied the colors used on the other University websites as a color palette.
We kept our banner logo as simple possible to clearly convey who is providing the repository service and what the repository does.
We also tried to theme the website so that the eye is drawn quickly and easily to the elements that matter, which are the items in collections.
To ensure that our help guides (that use screenshots extensively) are reliable we do the following:
- We maintain the same look and feel during upgrades
- We removed any confusing duplicate elements on the website, such as two places to login or to search.
We do not post current news etc and leave that to our blog, mailing list and twitter feed.
We also do not post detailed help guides, but rather built a wiki help guide.
See: http://scholar.sun.ac.za for an example.

In the beginning there was only the JSP interface.
Then the XML interface was introduced.
Mirage is a new XMLUI theme, added in DSpace 1.7 by @mire. The code was mainly developed by Art Lowel.
Then the Bootstrap theme for the JSPUI was introduced.
Then the Mobile theme for the XMLUI was introduced.
Then the Mirage2 bootstrap theme for the XMLUI was introduced with version 5.0.

We use the XMLUI because it allows much greater control over the theme, more so than the JSPUI.

With the XMLUI it is possible to theme communities and collections individually.