Distribution of custom translator amoung multiple users for private site

wejordan3
My company uses Zotero to get bibliographic information for documents hosted on public web sites, as well as for documents hosted on an internal web site that is not accessible to the public. In order to extract the information for the documents hosted on our internal site, we have written our own custom translator. We have a fairly large user base, and we need to make our translator accessible to all of them. Unfortunately, since the translator is for a private web site, we can't ask the Zotero development group to make it available for public distribution. In order to facilitate the internal distribution of our translator to our user base, we have modified the Zotero source code to make use of an internal translator repository, similar to the one that Zotero uses for public distribution of translators. Although this approach provides flexibility in distributing our custom translator, it requires our user base to work with our modified version of Zotero. This requirement presents some logistical difficulties which make our overall approach somewhat awkward.

Are there any other groups out there that have addressed this problem - specifically, enabling multiple users to work with a custom translator for a private web site? Any suggestions are welcome.
  • dstillman
    Translators in Zotero 1.5 are just individual JS files in a directory within the data directory. If you have centralized control over these machines, you could simply copy the custom translator into the appropriate directory on each (though you'd have to account for the randomized Firefox profile name ending in ".default").

    Alternatively, you could offer a simple installer on the intranet that installed the translator into the appropriate directory (again, taking into account the randomized directory name).
  • noksagt
    Rather than using a custom translator, why not modify the webapp to use a standard means of embedding metadata?
  • sean
    edited March 18, 2009
    Since you're already familiar with the code, you could also create a separate and very lightweight Firefox add-on just to pull your internal translator(s) down. Then you would be able to upgrade the regular Zotero client as needed. This kind of code might be useful for other users, too, and you could contribute it back to our plugins repository.
  • wejordan3
    Thanks very much, everyone, for your helpful advice. We had actually looked first at the idea of modifying our webapp to embed metadata that Zotero would recognize, but the design of the application (xslt transform of data pulled from an xml repository) was sufficiently complicated that it was easier for us to implement the custom translator. We will probably settle on a hybrid of the suggestions from Dan and Sean. When we get the Firefox plugin working, we'll be sure to contribute it to your repository.

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