05 aug

New year, who dis?

Hoooooo boy, it’s been a minute, huh? Lots of things went down in the last year between COVID, a new baby, getting back in the office… but I’m still here! Working on stuff!

It’s my first time really delving into DSpace, and I wanted to keep a record of all the things I’m doing to create a new template. The plan (for now) is to copy as much of the current theme to the new Angular front-end. That means I get to learn a bit of Angular and Typescript and do plenty of coding in Sass (my true love ).

What I’ve done so far

Yesterday, I found the DSpace slack group. This was helpful because all of the old docker images I had pulled down previously are now officially deprecated, and the group pointed me in the direction of how to locally work on a new custom theme via Try out DSpace 7. I chose the “Install the user interface only” option for now because I can use the test/demo REST API and data instead of manually adding a bunch of stuff. I’m hoping this will save me time! But if it turns out it’s not working for us, I can always spin up the docker stuff and transfer any work I’ve done on my machine to a docker image.

I already had all the dependencies installed (node, npm, yarn), so I cloned the new dpsace-angular repo, installed, and started it up. I had issues yesterday with the start-up process, but after a computer reboot this morning (that took FOREVER, thank you loading screen with the apple icon!!), everything is working now.

I’m going to do a quick read-through of the User Interface Customization docs and dive right in.