Zotero 8/9, BBT, and citation keys

edited yesterday at 3:15pm
[Split from Why are rapid releases major releases?]

I've lost track of what's going on with Zotero and its add-ons because of this version churn. Add-ons stop working and are abandoned. Others are impossible to figure out how they work now.

Take BBT, for example. I used to be able to pin a citation key, and it would appear in the "Additional" field. Then Zotero 8 arrived, claiming it now controls citation keys itself, and all my keys disappeared from the add-on.

Now I've updated to version 9, and the ability to pin citation keys has reappeared. The "Additional" field has returned, but it's empty everywhere.

Which behavior is a bug, and which isn't? I don't understand anything. I hope the developers themselves understand what they're doing.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited yesterday at 3:17pm
    Any special functionality about citation keys is entirely BBT, and none of this has anything to do with Zotero 8 or 9 or "version churn". The only change we made — in 7.0.31 — was to introduce an official Citation Key field and add auto-migration of known fields from Extra into the official fields. Everything else is BBT, so you'd have to ask the BBT developer.
  • As I understand it, up to and including Zotero version 7, BBT stored citation keys in the Extra field.

    After version 8, Zotero introduced its own native field for this purpose, and when upgrading from 7 to 8, there was a migration procedure—copying keys from the Extra field to Zotero's native field.

    But how does it all work now?

    Zotero still doesn't generate citation keys itself. So I still need the BBT plugin. And now, after installing it, I have three (3!) fields with citation keys in the program, which I can independently modify manually:
    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u6265101/qur5xnkageequdkmzsx8.jpg

    1 - Дополнительно - An Extra field in Russian translation. It seems, that BBT still stores key there after pinnig. Why does it happens? And why it does not use native field?
    2 - Ключ цитирования - In russian it translates as "Citation Key". Is it a native field?
    3 - Citation key - Again, the 3 field for citation key. What is the point?
  • See above.
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