Take Zotero beyond bibliographies...

swordsman74
...by implementing custom item types!

I desperately need a note-taking application that can handle rich-text notes plus structured data. Only NeoMem has come close, but it is not being actively developed, it is a stand-alone app, and it does not have web-clip abilities.

To be clear, I do not want the ability to customize existing item types - that becomes problem with future upgrades. I would just like the ability to set up custom items so I can specify what fields make up my book list, movie list, and account list. I know from the data model documentation that I could do this myself by modifying system.sql and zotero.properties, but I am hoping to not have to do that.

I think Zotero is already capable of more than academic uses, but having the ability to create custom data types would open it up to a huge variety of possibilites - with a relatively low amount of coding effort.
  • bdarcus
    If you search the forums, you'll see this has come up more than once before. The focus of Zotero is scholarly, and scholarly data demands some rigor. So adding custom types ad doing it right is not exactly straightforward.
  • swordsman74
    I apologize - I did browse this forum...but clearly missed it...

    If Zotero and its community choose to remain solely with an academic focus, that is fine. My point was to suggest that it could include more than that - not to suggest that it leave academic features behind.

    As for being straightforward, I was thinking of something as simple as adding another two companion files to system.sql and zotero.properties - ones that I could customize to add new data types, yet these wouldn't get overwritten by an upgrade but would be included whenever Zotero reads the original two files. I admit this probably would not qualify as "doing it right" but it is would be a solid start to begin from - the GUI portion could come later.

    Again, I do apologize for not finding the previous threads on this topic...
  • bdarcus
    As for being straightforward, I was thinking of something as simple as adding another two companion files to system.sql and zotero.properties - ones that I could customize to add new data types, yet these wouldn't get overwritten by an upgrade but would be included whenever Zotero reads the original two files.
    But that data only makes sense to you, then. Doing it "right" means thinking about how that data could be transferred, how it would map to output formatting, etc. I know you don't care about those details, but those of us who deal with scholarly data do (or at least should).
  • erazlogo
    edited May 6, 2009
    Custom item types are in fact planned. There is also a ticket for custom show/hide settings for item types and fields.
  • swordsman74
    bdarcus, you are correct - I had not considered the export functionality...

    Thanks for the info, eraz! That page you pointed to seems to say it was slated to be in 1.5 Beta 3 but was deleted - am I reading that correctly? If so, does that mean it has not yet been prioritized for another future release?
  • dstillman
    That page you pointed to seems to say it was slated to be in 1.5 Beta 3 but was deleted - am I reading that correctly?
    No, it was just an early ticket that had been tracking the highest available version number. I set it to 'future' because, as you suspect, there are no concrete plans to implement it in a specific version. This doesn't mean that, if implementation details could be worked out, it couldn't happen in an upcoming release, but, as Bruce notes, it's a complicated problem.

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