DMPonline release notes: December 2019

It has been some time since our last release as we have been very busy with new DMPonline contracts and custom domain branding for enhanced subscribers. We have also been exploring different hosting options - considering moving to Amazon Web Services or remaining with the University of Edinburgh. Our final decision is to keep hosting at the University of Edinburgh, but to change the setup so it is more under our control.

To keep you up to date with new features and bug fixes, I am providing you with a short summary of our most recent work. If you are interested in what are we currently work on check out the current sprint board on DMPRoadmap and the forthcoming development roadmap.

Accessibility

We have been focusing our work recently on accessibility as new requirement came into force for public websites on Monday 23rd September 2019.

The accessibility statement for DMPonline is available in the footer and you can see below some of the tickets we worked on recently to ensure compliance: 

  • We ensured that spellcheck is enabled for smaller data entry boxes (#2169)
  • We changed the areas where the system’s colour contrasts did not meet recommended guidance (#1457)
  • We used a blue outline to indicate where a user has tabbed to rather than a dotted outline to make navigation by keyboard easier (#2170)
  • We added an accessibility statement which now also includes other ways of contacting our team other than just email (#2171)
  • We improved compatibility with ZoomText and Windows Magnifier magnification functionality (#2172)
  • We made tooltips for logos more meaningful e.g. the University of Edinburgh logo says it is a link to the University of Edinburgh home page etc. (#2173)
  • We removed the pop up guidance provided by the fields and provided in another way such as text description under the question so it is compatible with assistive technology (#2174)
  • We now also give warnings when links open in new windows (#2175)
  • The modal dialogs now close when they lose focus (#1450)
  • Our guidance/comments sections are now accessible (#1444)
  • And the HTML from labels are clickable (#1656)

We fixed a few errors

A few of you reported to us that when you download plans with long names or unusual non-latin characters, they did not have filename extension (#2251). We have ensured that this appears correctly now. Another bug we have fixed was strange formatting of the bullet points after downloading the plan. Our software developers found out that it worked alright on Linux machines but the same document in Windows replaced the bullet point characters (#2147) but this now works on both.

 

Plus we worked on few requests from user groups

We have also relocated the request feedback button as many users did not see this and did not consider sharing their plan until it was completed (#2234). You can now see this in a tab between the Share and Download options so it should be much more visible.

Another request which we have worked on is improving the admin view / search of plans. We have expanded the search beyond just the title to also cover author name and template and now also display the department if this is used by your institution. (#2236). You can also click through from the number of plans to see the actual DMP per user.

You can see full release notes on the DMPRoadmap GitHub repo.

Other news…

We met with the California Digital Library and OPIDoR teams last month and planned our development roadmap for next year. You can read more about our meeting here.

Also in the meantime, our DMPonline developer team has grown. Sam Rust is joined by Ray Carrick who was previously working with us through EDINA, and at the beginning of December 2019 Marta Nicholson who worked with us a few years ago, returned to DCC.

We are keen to hear from you about how you use the tool and how we can improve it, so please feel free to email us at dmponline@dcc.ac.uk, or contact us on Twitter @DMPonline, Facebook and LinkedIn. To keep up with DMPonline news, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to receive our blogs and tweets, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and watch GitHub for code updates. You can also discuss any of our new features on the user group mailing list