Small changes neeeded to make saving web links easier

JJSDataDrop · November 12, 2017

1) Add the "URL" field to the list optional fields to display and sort by in the GUI. It is not there at the moment, but when saving a basic web link from a blog, the URL is sometimes the only reliable indicator that is saved prior to entering more data later. It would be nice to easily view all the recently saved URLs at a glance in the Zotero gui collections.

2) Make the "web page" type appear in the top dropdown menu list that appears when manually entering a new item. This is the default type for items saved from the browser, but it is cumbersome to access when doing a manual entry.

Both of the the above changes should be trivial from a developers POV.

dstillman · November 12, 2017

1) I don't think URL makes sense in the middle pane — most URLs would be far too long to view.

2) See the note here (but it may be added to the menu at some point with additional guidance that it isn't a recommended method).

JJSDataDrop · November 13, 2017

URL wouldn't be on by default. But if a given collection has a lot of items that, for the moment, are only distinguished by URL and time of modification/add, then anything shown is helpful. My use case is grabbing things from the Web that one might want to use as references later without wanting to stop and pre-commit time to manually filling out other fields.

Gurdas_Sandhu · November 13, 2017

@dstillman Curious, why even remove web page as an option from the "new item" options? Is there a technical challenge? If not, much better to have it listed than the extra steps of create using another item type, then change to web page. But the extra step is not the real problem, which is that users will struggle unless they know the two-step solution for web page type. Exceptions are never good, as you well know.

pjweiss · November 14, 2017

In some situations, I would find it useful to display and sort on the URL. The fact that the URL is long, and would get chopped off is fine. When I need this feature, I care about the main website, not further parts of the URL.