The upcoming August update includes a major upgrade of eHive functionality, both behind the scenes and for eHive users.
Exporting enhancements
Currently, exporting records is in XML format only. We are finalising work on further exporting formats, including exporting public, core or full record details in comma separated values format (CSV) for use in other applications.
This means you could easily import your records into Open Office for example. We’re also adding export options for the same subsets of fields in Microsoft Excel format.
Acquisition Records
The development of separate Acquisition Records allows you to track common acquisition information for one or more objects in a single acquisition record and to track acquisitions before they are approved.
The acquisition record includes the source of the acquisition, the method by which it came into the collection, notes, date, a description of the whole acquisition, price and valuation. Acquisition records can be created before the cataloguing of the individual objects if necessary, and be linked to one or more object records that share the same acquisition information at any time.
Standard Reports
Our first new standard reports are being released this August. The first two add to the functionality of administrating communities:
Community Administration Reports
• Summary report – easily review the total of pending, approved and declined members for your community. You can also view the total number of published object records contributed to date.
• Download a list of approved members for your community.
Additional standard object based reports are planned to cover basic collections management functions. In the next release after August we will be adding entry receipts (based on the Acquisition Record information) and exhibition labels.
Search Friendly URLs
The web address structure within eHive is getting a serious reworking.
As an example, the current object page addresses look like:
http://ehive.com/index.php?option=com_ehive&task=showDetail&recordIdSet=2406
In the August release we’ll be changing to a more human readable format. For example, the above URL will probably change to:
http://ehive.com/object/2406
(we’re just finalising how accounts and objects will fit within the URL)
The changes to the address style has a few benefits:
• More readable for users
• Better indexing by search engines
• Easier editing of the addresses to get to other content (e.g. open the page for a specific record by typing in the URL).
The changes are also laying the groundwork for our future public application programming interfaces (APIs). We’ll be adding code to redirect links to the old style addresses to the new addresses.
