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User Guide

Polina Yordanova edited this page Mar 20, 2019 · 8 revisions

Before you start...

EFES is designed to be easy to deploy by an epigraphist, papyrologist or historian with good working knowledge of EpiDoc and TEI XML, but no prior experience of computer programming, software development, or web design. For finer customization some basic understanding of XSLT and XPath might be useful, although in reality the infrastructure of the platform has been laid in such a way that by copying and pasting preexisting code one can find their way around by only committing minor changes where relevant.

Prerequisites

There are a few assumptions on the basis of which EFES has been built. If you would like to use EFES "out of the box", you should take care that:

  • your inscriptions are in valid XML files encoded according to the EpiDoc standards;
  • you have one file per inscription;
  • your authority files follow the structure of the ones provided;
  • your images can be in any image format, but currently only jpeg files are processed into thumbnails;
  • if you are running a multilingual project, your multilingual metadata is contained in repeated elements with @xml:lang.

In case your project treats any of the aforementioned aspects differently, the sitemaps need to be modified to reflect your methods.

Quickstart

  1. Download or clone the EFES code from the GitHub repository.
  2. Open a terminal window/command line and go to the directory where EFES is installed.
  3. Run the command build.sh (Mac OS X/Linux) or build.bat (Windows), and leave the Terminal window open.
  4. Open a browser and go to http://127.0.0.1:9999/. It should display a welcome page together with some very basic navigation.
  5. Store project XML content (EpiDoc files) in the folder /webapps/ROOT/content/xml/epidoc/.
  6. Index newly added files through the Admin panel on the site.
  7. View HTML versions of your XML files at http://127.0.0.1:9999/en/inscriptions/.

Tutorial pages

The following tutorial pages are directed both towards people who have attended an EFES workshop and need to refresh their knowledge with a quick reference list, and towards those whose first encounter with EFES would be this user documentation, and therefore provide detailed step-by-step explanations with snippets of code blocks and are designed to be sufficient for the inexperienced user. We will be continuously improving and enriching the user guide which currently covers the following topics:

Since EFES is a derivative of Kiln, features that are more generic and not only EFES-specific are covered in the Kiln documentation.