Modifying OS-ELN

You can change the OS-ELN in a number of ways. This file gives some simple examples and pointers to more information. For more information, ask on the os-eln-discuss mailing list.

License obligations

The OS-ELN is made available to you under a license which requires you to make available any modifications you make to the product.

You must make Source Code of all Your Deployed Modifications publicly available under the terms of this License

Specifically, any changes you make to the files as distributed in the archive; any changes you make "Through the web" using Zope, which are stored in the Data.fs, need not be made available. Most cosmetic customisation can be done through the web and need not be made published.

You can make your modifications available on a web site of your choosing, and announce them on os-eln-announce, or you can join this web site and put them in your members folder. If appropriate, your changes can/will be incorporated into the core distribution.

In this way, we hope OS-ELN will grow to the benefit of all.

Cosmetic modifications

OS-ELN is built on top of Zope's CMF. We use a "Skin" folder to distributed the core look & feel, and you can then override that in your specific installation. As new versions of OS-ELN are made available, you can install them and your customisations will remain.

To make such modifications

• go to the management interface of your Zope instance (http://my.zope.server:8080/manage, or whatever port number you have used for Zope) and log in as your adminstrator user (which you used to create the OS-ELN site in the Zope management interface).
• go into your OS-ELN site. You will see a number of items with names beginning "portal_"
• go into the "portal_skins" tool
• click on the "Contents" tab
• you will see a number of folders, most of which have a padlock inside the folder icon. The "custom" folder doesn't have a padlock.
• these folders are "skin" folders, which represent files on the file system. Go into the "experiment" folder, and you will see the code that forms the UI of the OS-ELN
• when you customise any of these items, a copy will be taken and placed in the "custom" folder. Whatever is in this folder will override what is distributed in the core OS-ELN distribution

In this way, you can customise the look & feel of the OS-ELN as you wish.

Note, none of the changes you make in this way need to be published to the community.

Other, more powerful customisations

Zope is very powerful. You can:

• write Python and Perl methods to add new functionality to your ELN
• create new content types which can be added to experiments
• interface with other web sites
• create & use XML
• access SQL databases, etc.
• use other sources for membership data (usernames and passwords) - for example, LDAP, SQL, NT, etc.

For more information on what you can do, see the Zope and CMF documentation. A good place to start is the documentation section of Zope.org.

Keep in touch

As you explore what you can do with the OS-ELN, please do keep in touch with the community on the os-eln-discuss list. We're here to provide help, advice, and encouragement, and to make OS-ELN better for everyone.