About the Website Technical Overview and Acknowledgements
This website is dependent on a number of free/libre software projects and aims to make its contents available using open standards. These are detailed here to acknowledge that debt and to highlight these projects for any readers who are technically interested.
Open Standards
Open Standards in metadata allow different software to share information in a mutually intelligible way (in contrast with proprietary formats and standards, which commonly can only be read by specific commercial applications).
The archive makes use of Schema.org structured markup to add semantic, machine-readable metadata describing organisations, publications, people etc. to our pages where relevant.
Document pages also includes COinS and Dublin Core bibliographic metadata, which allows software such as Zotero and others to automatically read bibliographic information from each respective page, making it easier to add items to bibliography managing software.
Free/Libre Software
The website uses a number of Free/libre software projects. Free/libre software allows the user to use, share and modify it, without the restrictions of proprietary software 1.
The core of the site is built with Symphony CMS - an open source (MIT licenced) CMS which provides the site administration area and allows construction of a custom frontend with XSLT.
The frontend (i.e the pages visible to visitors) uses Bootstrap for much of its layout and visual design.
Beyond the construction of the site itself, it runs, like much of the web, on a server that uses free/libre software projects in a combination often abbreviated to LAMP (GNU/Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP).
Javascript
The Timeline of the Irish Left uses a custom JS module created for the site, which is available under GPLv3, as well as some external libraries.
Name | Licence |
---|---|
Timeline | GPLv3 |
Tippy.js | MIT |
Popper | MIT |
Panzoom | MIT |
A number of free software javascript libraries provide additional frontend functionality for the rest of the website.
Name | Licence |
---|---|
Jquery | MIT |
Bootstrap Javascript | MIT |
Easy Autocomplete | MIT |
Panzoom | MIT |
DataTables | MIT |
Bootstrap Slider | MIT |
Jquery Markdown | MIT |
JS Cookie | MIT |
MediaElement | MIT |
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For a useful overview of Free Software, see the Free Software Foundation’s definition . The distinction with “open source” is also usefully described on the GNU website ↩