Customising DMPonline
We are currently offering two main subscription packages for DMPonline: basic and enhanced. With the basic package you can upload your logo and add some links to the header, whereas with the enhanced package you can define the colours, page content and URL. This allows you to make DMPonline look and feel like your institution webpage. In this blog post I explain what you can customise with DMPonline.
I have grouped the customisable features into three main groups namely: colours, page content and automated email text, and your own URL.
1, Colours
Institutions have corporate colours for which they are recognised. We can easily implement these colours on DMPonline so it will look and feel like your own institution. In our experience so far, institutions normally select single-colour customisation. This means, that you will select the primary site colour and background colour for selected menus. In general, if you decide to keep all of the elements the same colour, it creates cohesive look and feel. Nonetheless, the individual elements can be specified separately, and if this is the route your institution decides to take please have a look at the individual elements on our GitHub wiki page.
2, Setting up the content of your pages & automated emails
Another feature you can customise is the content of the main DMPonline pages located on your custom domain. You can define the content and include images, text, GIF, video or anything else desired. Feel free to be creative as much as you wish to. You can define the content on the following pages:
- Homepage
- Help
- About
- Contact us
Most of the generic help text will apply, but you may wish to change to your address in the contact us page, link to your maps or add your working hours. Similarly, you can make text changes to the home page and about us, or provide entirely new content if preferred.
You can also customise the automated emails that are sent from DMPonline – such as welcoming a user to the service, inviting them to collaborate on a plan, or letting them know their access has been revoked. The generic texts should work fine, but you can change their content if this is something you prefer. If you are not sure which texts this applies to, please note that institutions that subscribed for the enhanced package will receive a document with all the texts they can amend.
3, Setting up your own URL
The final, yet greatest benefit of the enhanced package is that you can have
your own URL. This allows you to direct users to DMPonline on your own domain (e.g. https://dmponline.tudelft.nl), again increasing recognition. Effectively, you can use any URL, however, there will need to be done some work on your end too. In practice this will mean that if your users log in via DMPonline (main site) they will get re-directed to your branded site. Users who create accounts associated with your organisation will also be re-directed to your branded site. We use our development server, where we can make as many sub-domains as we want, to test the look and feel and the desired text changes. The best way forward in customising your own URL is to get us in touch with your technical team. Once we are in touch with your technical team we can communicate all the details required for setting this up directly with them.
4, So how do institutions set up their own customisation?
Institutions who have signed up for the enhanced subscription will have already received an email from me a few weeks ago. If you did not receive an email, please get in touch. I sent a document with all the details, that you can amend. I would like to kindly ask you to take your time to fill in the document and notify us of any proposed changes. Once we receive all the details from you about your customisation, our software developers will start to implement all the desired changes. Our software developers will then deploy the changeable features to our test site, and we can agree the look and feel with you before deploying this for your users. Then we will get your final URL to redirect to our load-balancer and redirect DMPonline to your URL.