mir-navigation-plugin

This MIR plugin provides navigation functionality for newspapers and series.

It provides a panel for the frontend that displays the series navigation, including banner and search. The navigation is based on a derivate that contains a navigation.xml file, where the navigation structure and banner can be configured.

It leverages enhanced Solr handling for parent documents (root field) and includes extended Solr processing for series.

⚠️ Note: The plugin will overwrite response-mir.xsl; any custom frontend changes may be lost.

---

Features

The plugin offers the following features:

• Frontend Navigation Panel: Displays a series of pages or objects with banner and search.
• Banner Support: Root item can include a banner image.
• Flexible Navigation: Defined via navigation.xml with relative/absolute links and multilingual labels.
• Enhanced Solr Handling: Supports parent documents (root field) and requires schema extensions.
• Optional RSS Feed: RSS link can be displayed or disabled.

---

Requirements

Navigation category in derivate_types classification

The plugin is based on a derivate which must be classified via derivate_types:navigation. Therefore, the derivate_types classification must include a category navigation. The category can be defined as follows:

<category ID="navigation">
  <label xml:lang="de" text="Navigation" />
  <label xml:lang="en" text="Navigation" />
</category>

---

Installation & Configuration

Build and provide plugin

Build the JAR file with mvn clean install and copy it to ~/.mycore/(dev-)mir/lib/.

Configure mycore.properties

To use the plugin, configuration in ~/.mycore/(dev-)mir/mycore.properties is required. The RSS feed requires a mycoreobject-rss stylesheet, which is not included by default. For historical reasons, the link to the RSS feed is always displayed, but it can be disabled if needed. All in all, configure as follows:

# Add 'series-banner' and 'series-layout'.
MIR.Layout.End=mir-edit,series-banner,series-layout,mir-citation,mir-thumbnail,mir-epusta,mir-access-rights,mir-export,mir-admindata,mir-historydata

# Optional: disable RSS feed.
MIR.Metadata.Navigation.SeriesPanel.RSS.Enabled=false

Reload and rebuild Solr

The plugin leverages enhanced Solr handling for parent documents. For this purpose, the plugin brings its own schema extensions. It is necessary to reload the Solr schema (for further information have a look on Solr documentation). In the case of a standard Solr core installation (where the main core is named main), run the following CLI commands:

# Synchronize the solr main core with the solr schema from this plugin.
reload solr configuration main in core main
# Reindex solr with the rules.
rebuild solr metadata and content index in core main

As a result, Solr entries will now support the extended handling for parent documents (root field).

---

Usage

A panel on an object page, including a banner, navigation, and search, can be integrated via a navigation.xml file contained in a derivative whose derivate type is set to navigation. The following format is expected for the navigation.xml file:

<item banner="path/to/banner.png">
  <item ref="path/to/page1.xml">
    <label xml:lang="de">German label for page 1</label>
    <label xml:lang="en">English label for page 1</label>
  </item>
  <item ref="path/to/page2.xml">
    <label xml:lang="de">German label for page 2</label>
    <label xml:lang="en">English label for page 2</label>
  </item>
</item>

A root item is expected first. The optional banner attribute can be used to specify a link to an image that will be displayed above the navigation.

Within the root item, the actual navigation points can be defined. The ref attribute specifies the target of a navigation point and can contain either a relative or an absolute link.
Additionally, labels can be defined for the relevant languages.

💡 Tip: Using the mir-alias-plugin, you can simplify the links for objects in the navigation.