We are working to produce a WordPress plugin for the Modes software family. This WordPress site will document our progress, and will also act as a test-bed to demonstrate what we have managed to achieve so far. If you have any thoughts or comments on this, you can leave them as comments on these articles, or send an email to me at richard at light.demon.co.uk.

The approach we are adopting is to support one or more WordPress “shortcodes”, which are codes enclosed in square brackets.  These shortcodes will be replaced by suitable Modes data and associated controls. (For example there will be a “navigator”, which allows users to browse through a set of results from a search.) The first round of work produced a “Modes data” plugin, which was demonstrated at the Modes Workshop in September 2012. This supported searches on Modes indexes, and the display of specific records (or sets of records).  It is AJAX-based, meaning that the results are updated without needing to refresh the complete page.

For the production-level plugin, we need to make it easy for the public to see what is in a Modes collection without having to run a search.  Therefore we want to develop a “Modes browser” which offers a number of pre-designed searches or subsets of the data, so that with a single click users can see a set of records, and with a second click they can be looking at the detail of one specific object.

Apart from the shortcode to support browsing and searching, we are interested in developing a plugin to support the production of user-generated content and the uploading of such data to a Modes data file.  This may range from a simple “comment” box through to complex structured data entry.  It could be used equally for public participation and for inhouse collections management support.