Customizing DSpace v1.5.1

Prior to version 1.5.1 of DSpace, customization was done using a separate project called Manakin. The name persists within DSpace, including DSpace documentation, but actually it is all integrated now and customization is done in the dspace tree, not some separate project.

Details on how to customize dspace are very thin on the ground and most talk about how to do it when it was the separate Manakin project. I have managed to find something that works for me. Here's how I did it:

• Stop tomcat.
• Delete the tomcat dir webapps/xmlui.
• go to the dir in which you unpacked dspace. My dir is called dspace-1.5.1-src-release.
• Go to the sub-dir where the themes are stored. The documentation I found leads you to the wrong place. I found I had to go to dspace-xmlui/dspace-xmlui-webapp/src/main/webapp/themes.
• Copy the dir that is closest to the theme you want. Copy the whole dir to a new target theme name. The one I copy is Reference.
• This next step is CRUCIAL - edit sitemap.xmap to make it refer to the new theme name. If you don't then it will still refer to Reference! You need to go to the map:components section near the start. There you will see a section that looks like this:

  <map:component-configurations>
      <global-variables>
          <theme-path>Reference</theme-path>
          <theme-name>put your theme description 
              here</theme-name>
      </global-variables>
  </map:component-configurations>
    

  Change Reference and update the comment.
• Edit dspace/config/xmlui.xconf. Go to the end where you will see the path defined for the default theme. It is Reference/. Note the trailing slash, it is important. Change Reference for your theme name.
• Change something in your theme dir so that the change will be visually obvious. For example you can change the style sheet to refer to a different background image.
• Rebuild dspace with these theme changes. Use the command 'mvn package'. This builds to [dspace-src]/dspace/target.
• Update the dspace installation (which is in c:\dspace for me). Use the command 'ant update'.
• copy the dir dspace/webapps/xmlui to the tomcat webapps dir.
• Restart tomcat.

importing into DSpace

I finally managed to import a text file into DSpace today. It was "Decline of Science in England" by Charles Babbage. Here's how I did it:

• create an import directory. I called mine test-import.
• Create a directory below the import directory. I named it decline, after the book.
• Put the text file into the directory 'decline'.
• Create the file dublin_core.xml, in the 'decline' directory. The file looked like this:

  <dublin_core>
      <dcvalue element="title" qualifier="none">
          Decline of Science in England
      </dcvalue>
  
      <dcvalue element="subject" qualifier="none">
         science
      </dcvalue>
  </dublin_core>
  

• Create a file called content. The file contains a list of filenames, one per line. In this case I had body (which was the name of my text file) and preface, which was a separate preface file I created.

To import the item I then created a community and a collection under it, and gave this command:

bin\dsrun org.dspace.app.itemimport.ItemImport -a -e emailAddress
-m mapfile.out -c 125050010/1469 -s test-import