Enterprise Zotero Use with a Customized Style?

kristle · November 14, 2007

My organization is planning on using Zotero enterprise wide. However, due to the unique nature of our products, we utilize a customized version of Chicago. Theoretically, we can create our custom style prior to pushing out Zotero. A few questions have arisen ....

When Zotero is updated what happens to our custom style format?
Will we have to redo this on everyone's machine?

Hopefully, we are not the first group to do this. Thanks.

bdarcus · November 14, 2007

I don't speak for Zotero, but on the styles issue, you'd want to probably submit the style to the new repository. Information there should probably explain how things would work.

dstillman · November 14, 2007

The custom style wouldn't be overridden as long as it had a unique URI (the element in the CSL), so you could add it to scrapers.sql in the XPI and distribute your custom build. Even if styles were reset in the prefs, Zotero would rebuild from scrapers.sql first and include your custom style before updating via the repository.

Note that this wouldn't help people who had already installed Zotero.

Another option (or an option for those people, even if you do make a custom build) is to put your custom version on a server somewhere and serve it with text/x-csl, then point people to go to that URL in a Zotero-enabled Firefox to install it. This will work in Zotero 1.0.2 once it comes out.

It's possible we could add a hidden pref for additional comma-separated CSL URIs to download automatically, though pointing to an Atom-based feed (as Bruce has suggested) would be better to handle updates. I don't know how soon that will happen.