Ensuring that documents work with new Zotero versions

jphekman

I wanted to give some more general feedback about my recent experience with trying to edit an older document (last edited about 4 months ago) with Zotero citations in it.

My experience with coming back to a document with Zotero citations after several months (and several plugin upgrades) is that I am doomed to encounter problems with the document such that I must essentially start from scratch. This has happened to me several times before.

Now, I really like Zotero, and I really want to keep using it, so I am offering my help with testing. My suspicion is that the problem is with consistency between upgrades of the plugin. Is it helpful for me to be sure to open a document and try to edit the references every so often, and give feedback if things break? Anything else I should be doing to make sure that documents don't break when they are abandoned for several months?

I also would like to give the feedback that from a user perspective, the best use of your development time would be in extensive testing when you release new versions (rather than focusing on new features).

I hope this is helpful. Zotero is a great application and I want to see it do well.

Thanks,
Jessica

ajlyon

The only case in which it should have been necessary to open the file to maintain compatibility was in the switch from Zotero 1.x to Zotero 2.0 and later. References can also break if you export and reimport items, for example to move them to another computer. Moving items in this way will break the documents that refer to them-- but if you use syncing for that, documents should be safe.

Do you still have the documents that have stopped working? Do you know what version of Zotero they were originally created with?

dstillman

Jessica: You already have a thread on this. It's not helpful to start a new one.

http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/17826/