Feature Suggestions for Zotpress?

First, I wanted to say this is a fantastic plugin — thanks very much for the hard work!
Here are two things I can’t figure out how to do currently:

1) Order by the last name of the author. I’m using chicago-author-date, but would also apply to MLA, etc. I understand this can get tricky in a mixed list of items, some of which don’t have explicit authors, but perhaps one could fail back to the name of the publication/work in that case? It would also be no problem for author-less items to sort to the very bottom.

2) Hyperlink the URL’s returned. Although inappropriate for print, wrapping them in a href makes a lot of sense for the web. I am guessing this a different issue than the “Download” option?

Big Props for the PlugIn and same 2 suggestions from me and an additional one:

1) the Ordering just doesn’t seem to work with longer lists

2) The Hyperlink/Download Option would be great

3) I would like to be able to format the Output with HTML-tags to change Font Size etc.

Thanks for the input!

@pleonard:

(1) Sadly, ordering/sorting is out for now due to issues on the Zotero side of things. The best that Zotpress can offer right now is filtering by author. See the note under “URL Parameters > order” here.

(2) Done, as of 3.0! Thanks for the great suggestion.

@funkyshab:

(1) Actually, ordering isn’t working at all (well, you can only order by the “dateAdded” field). The Zotero folks are working on getting this running. See my (1) note to @pleonard above.

(2) As of 3.0, I’ve applied a number of IDs and classes to citation elements. If this still isn’t rich enough, please let me know EXACTLY what you’d like to be able to style via CSS, and I’ll see what I can do. Note: The citations often come pre-styled based on the reference style (e.g. MLA, APA, etc.) you choose.

Is it possible to have a function where I enter a bibliographic reference (e.g. “this is what someone said (Smith 2011, 1)” and this automatically creates the bibliography pulled from my Zotero account? As is the case with Zotero in Word etc.

This would be amazing!
Cheers,
A

I would like to display my notes with my bibliographic citations. I’ve been playing around with it myself, and it looks like it would be non-trivial, but possible. So far, what I’ve been able to get it to do was to include notes with a certain by creating a function that is called whenever the $item_type = “note”. The function does an API call for just that note that does not specify a style, and therefore returns an XML document containing the note text. (See below for a sample record.) I’m then able to parse the XML to create HTML of the note text.

This seems like it might be unnecessarily inefficient, and the notes and citations are all jumbled together. You’ll have a citation for one item, followed by a note that was the child of another item, with no visual indication of how the two are (not) related.

The XML for the notes contains a value for the parent (<link rel=”up” type=”application/atom+xml” href=”https://api.zotero.org/users/163121/items/E7WV8SJT”/&gt;), but of course, you would have to sort all of this out before printing any of it to the screen, which doesn’t seem to be how things are done currently.

So I have two questions: (1) would it be possible to have this feature, and (2) am I approaching my attempts to implement it myself the wrong way?

Thank you,
Rebecca

— Sample note record ———–
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<entry xmlns=”https://www.w3.org/2005/Atom&#8221; xmlns:zapi=”https://zotero.org/ns/api”&gt;
<title>…</title>
<author>
<name>rloconne</name>
<uri>https://zotero.org/rloconne</uri&gt;
</author>
<id>https://zotero.org/rloconne/items/UCPZQD6T</id&gt;
<published>2011-04-08T03:45:17Z</published>
<updated>2011-04-08T03:45:45Z</updated>
<link rel=”self” type=”application/atom+xml” href=”https://api.zotero.org/users/163121/items/UCPZQD6T”/&gt;
<link rel=”up” type=”application/atom+xml” href=”https://api.zotero.org/users/163121/items/E7WV8SJT”/&gt;
<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/html” href=”https://zotero.org/rloconne/items/UCPZQD6T”/&gt;
<zapi:key>UCPZQD6T</zapi:key>
<zapi:itemType>note</zapi:itemType>
<zapi:numTags>3</zapi:numTags>
<content type=”xhtml”>
<div xmlns=”https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”&gt;
<table>
<tr class=”itemType”>
<th style=”text-align: right”>Type</th>
<td>Note</td>
</tr>
<tr class=”note”>
<th style=”text-align: right”>Note</th>
<td>
<div style=”background-color:#ffffff;font:normal normal normal 13px/19px Georgia, ‘Times New Roman’, ‘Bitstream Charter’, Times, serif;padding:.6em;margin:0px;”>
<p>Textual history</p>
<p>”A text does not fully or unambiguously display its history—even the most insightful of interpretations and analyses are only likely to recover some elements of its fuller history, to notice some textual features that allow for uncertain guesses about their origins…All writing draws on writers’ knowledge, beliefs, and practices, built up through experiences of socially and historically situated life events. Writers themselves are only very partially aware of the many debts they owe to these intertextual and intercontextual influences,” (171).</p>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
</content>
</entry>

@rloconne Wow, looks like you’ve already gotten pretty far with this — I’ll see about implementing a “notes” feature into the next version of Zotpress.

@rloconne I sent a question to the dev list about an easier way to get at the notes for each citation … hopefully there’s a better way to do this.

@andoskin I’ve implemented this in Zotpress 4.3. Hope you like it! I’d love feedback — it really is a first strike at this.

Hi.
Brilliant plugin!
I have some quick suggestions:

1. Being able to set a standard style. If one wants to be consistent without needing to write “style=” all the time throughout the blog this would be useful.
2. Localization. It doesn’t look that good on my Swedish blog if references are formatted with “p. 32” where i would like the Swedish “s. 32” etc. Is this due to the zotero-styles and should be handled that way or something that can be handled in zotpress?
3. Further improvements of the inText feature. This is what I’ve been looking for from the beginning. I’m used to writing in LaTeX and using biblatex, which gives me complete control over citation and bibliography styles, switchable for the entire document through just some simple commands. I know that zotpress can’t rival this anytime soon. But it’s my ideal anyway.
4. Point-and-click interface. It can be hard to remember shortcodes and copy id’s. It would be easier if there was a button where one could choose items/styles/sorting etc. and get the shortcode generated directly into the editor.

Thanks again for the brilliant work!

@andersjohansson Thanks for all the comments and suggestions!

1. Good idea. I’m thinking about adding a “Zotpress Settings” shortcode to address this. (Reason being that you might want different settings per post.)

2. Right now, the in-text styling is being manually done in Zotpress. I don’t know if the Zotero API will do this (seems to be for generating bibliographies only.) However, I will look into this. At worst, we can start localizing Zotpress on our own (and translators will be credited by Zotpress).

3. I want this too! The biggest problem is that there’s a number of different WordPress text editors and it’s simply impossible to create code that would work with them all. (At least, in theory.) I’ll keep pondering on this …

4. Done. Check out Zotpress 4.5 and let me know what you think. It’s a first pass so there’s probably lots to be improved upon!

I don’t if it’s possible, but adding an amazon links for each items in the bibliography with amazon resellers code.
(I’m not an amazon fan, I prefere my local real bookstore, but it’s could be an easy way for visitors to get the book and for blog writer to monetarize their expertise (and make donation for zotpress :p).

Hi,
first of all thanks for the great work on this plugin. We’re currently evaluating it for use on a new website for our research group and it’s saving us a lot of work already.

As for suggestions.. although the display of citations can be styled to some extent already using css, it would be nice to have a little more control over what data is being rendered. We would like, for example, to not show the “Retrieved from…” link, but do want the “(Download)” link for pdfs uploaded in zotero. Would that be possible? I can also imagine that we might want to not show the doi always. On a long list of references it would be good to have the option of showing only a minimum of data. Could options like these be added to the shortcode parameters?

Another thing I found useful in bibliplug (which we’ve abandoned in favour of zotpress you might be happy to hear ;)) is the option when setting up the zotero connection to only import a particular folder of the specified user or group. This could dramatically cut down on data being synced I’d imagine.

Cheers,
Thomas.