[OWW-SC] OWW Lab Notebook: very preliminary preview

[Bill F]

The OWW Lab Notebook is available for your investigation on the main wiki.

You must be logged in to use the Lab Notebook.

To enable OWW Lab Notebook for your OWW account, simply go to the "my
preferences" page (http://openwetware.org/wiki/Special:Preferences) and
select the "Misc" tab at the far right.

The OWW Lab Notebook pages are not populated until you enable it for your
account. However, if you choose to turn off the Lab Notebook features, an
data you have collected will remain intact. There is never a place where we
will be deleting data. This is an absolutely cardinal rule. As you may know,
the MediaWiki application creates a new copy of any document as soon as a
change is saved to the database. We are doing nothing to interfere with this
absolutely critical feature of MediaWiki.

Clicking on the "Enable Lab Notebook" checkbox and saving the new value
will  make it accessible.

Once it's enables, you should see a new "My Lab Notebook" link added to the
end of the list of entries in the top right hand corner of your screen.

Click on the "My Lab Notebook" link to access the Lab Notebook.

Please note: this is not all there yet There's still more to come.

Later tonight (1/14/2008), I'll turn on the page reformatting feature. I
have a few more tests to run and this feature will be enabled.

I also need to finish a few changes that will allow each user to optionally
control the format of all of the pages they create.

I'll send an update when both of these features are turned on.

I'm hoping to have a preliminary version of a modified OWW Search box that
will only search pages within the Lab Notebook by the end of the week.

Currently, the only use option for the Lab Notebook is to enter content by
date and have it displayed by Project. We'll have a version that works the
opposite online soon that allows for the opposite: enter by product but view
the entries by date.

In both cases, you can also view and edit the original  date and project
entries.


There's a discussion page for Lab Notebook at the following URL:

http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Lab_Notebooks/Discussion

Please provide feedback. This is a preliminary version.

There's an overview document at the following location:

http://openwetware.org/wiki/OpenWetWare:Software/Projects/Lab_Notebooks/Overview

The following is a list of templates currently used in the Lab Notebook:

Template:LnNotebookCreate
Template:LnNotebookView
Template:LnNotebookCalendar
Template:LnNotebookIcon

Template:LnProjectBaseModify
Template:LnProjectCreate
Template:LnProjectView

Template:LnEntries
Template:LnEntryCurrent
Template:LnEntryDateHeader
Template:LnEntryImage
Template:LnEntryNavigate

The templates work in conjunction with  a set of extensions.  The extensions
and templates share a common internal structure. There is a set of variables
which we will be documenting that are accessible via the MediaWiki Template
languages. I'll provide more details when the initial components are all up
and running.

Be cautions if you immediately want to use this for your work. Any
information entered into the Lab Notebook will be safe. But the Project
display pages still are being tweaked. As I said, I will send out an update
message later this evening.

What you see is how I've initial set of the components together: the layout
is not carved in stone. This is more of an erector set than a static
application.

Please sound off about what you need this thing to do that it doesn't look
as if it will do now. We want to grow this out to meet as many requirements
aswe can.


Thanks.

Bill Flanagan
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