August 2004. What’s new in ACIS

New navigation design: navigation within profile, between subscreens of research profile and affiliations profile. Better display of the initial registration steps.

Research profile redesign.  Now it is split into several sub-screens, each for a particular purpose. Improved visibility of the selected documents (in suggestions listings).

Initial registration “guide” screens.  When user adds an affiliation, such screen springs up.  In short, it says something like “Hey, we added your affiliation, now you have these affiliations.  Do you want to go to the next registration step or do you want to continue with affiliations?”  Similar screen is shown when user adds some documents to his research profile or does any other change. (Only during initial registration.)  “Continue registration” buttons removed.

Numerous bugfixes in a number of areas.  Many CSS glitches fixed.  Achieved much better support for Internet Explorer for Windows. (Supported versions are 5.0, 5.5, 6.0.)

Research profile’s automatic search has been much improved. Now it finds editor name matches.  Now it searches by email address of the user (matching against the personal email addresses in the documents’ data).  Now it searches by last name of the person.

Automatic Research Profile Update system.  Now we can do automatic searches for our users from time to time and let them know if anything interesting was found.  Documents’ references to particular personal records (through id or short-id) will be processed—the document will be added to the person’s profile.  Users can switch their preferences (allowing or disallowing automatic addition of items) on a special screen, part of research profile.

Record short-id is now displayed on the profile overview page and on the static profile page.

Technical side of things

Short-ids are unique and not supposed to be re-usable.  But until now a new short-id was issued for each new registration attempt, even if the user never confirmed her registration. Not anymore.

Also, I worked towards AMF support.  I made a toolkit for working with AMF, available in our code/ directory. My plan is to work a little bit more on that and, finally, make AMF an input data format for ACIS.

Another great thing on my workplan is writing documentation.


~ Ivan Kurmanov