medeopolis / providence

Cataloguing and data/media management application

README: Providence version 2.0

About CollectiveAccess

CollectiveAccess is collections management and presentation software maintained by the staff at Whirl-i-Gig and contributed to by the open-source community. The CollectiveAccess project began in 2003 as a response to the complete lack of non-commercial, affordable, open-source solutions for digital collections management. Almost two decades later, CollectiveAccess has projects on 5 continents, providing hundreds of institutions with configurable, up-to-date collections management software.

A web-based suite of applications providing a framework for management, description, and discovery of complex digital and physical collections in museum, archival, and research contexts, CollectiveAccess consists of two applications: Providence and Pawtucket2. Providence, the “back-end” cataloging component of CollectiveAccess, is highly configurable and supports a variety of metadata standards, data types, and media formats. Pawtucket2 is CollectiveAccess' general purpose public-access publishing tool, providing an easy way to create web sites around data managed with Providence. (You can learn more about Pawtucket2 at https://github.com/collectiveaccess/pawtucket2)

CollectiveAccess is freely available under the open source GNU Public License version 3, meaning it’s not only free to download and use but that users are encouraged to share and distribute code.

About CollectiveAccess 2.0

This version of CollectiveAccess is compatible with PHP versions 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2.

What's New

CollectiveAccess version 2.0 offers a variety of new and improved features and functionality, including:

Installation

To install CollectiveAccess version 2.0, first make sure your server meets all of the requirements. Then follow the installation instructions.

Updating from Providence version 1.7 or later

NOTE: The update process is relatively safe and rarely, if ever, causes data loss. That said, BACKUP YOUR EXISTING DATABASE AND CONFIGURATION prior to updating. You almost certainly will not need it, but if you do you'll be glad it's there.

To update from a version 1.7.x installation, decompress the CollectiveAccess Providence 2.0 tar.gz or zip file, and replace the files in your existing installation with those in the update. Take care to preserve your media directory, local configuration directory (app/conf/local), any local print templates (app/printTemplates) and your setup.php file.

Once the updated files are in place, navigate in your web browser to the login screen. You will see this message:

Your database is out-of-date. Please install all schema migrations starting with migration #xxx. Click here to automatically apply the required updates, or see the update HOW-TO for instructions on applying database updates manually.

The migration number may vary depending upon the version you're upgrading from. Click on the here link to begin the database update process.

The search engine and system for sorting data are new in version 2.0. After updating your 1.7.x installation you must run the caUtils update-from-1.7 command.

Updating from Providence version 1.6 or earlier

To update from a version 1.6.x or older installation, you must first update to version 1.7, the follow the 1.7 update instructions.

Installing development versions

The latest development version is always available in the develop branch (https://github.com/collectiveaccess/providence/tree/develop). Other feature-specific development versions are in branches prefixed with dev/. To install a development branch follow these steps:

1. clone this repository into the location where you wish it to run using git clone https://github.com/collectiveaccess/providence.
2. by default, the newly cloned repository will use the main branch, which contains code for the current release. Choose the develop branch by running from within the cloned repository git checkout develop.
3. install the PHP package manager Composer if you do not already have it installed on your server.
4. run composer from the root of the cloned repository with composer.phar install. This will download and install all required 3rd party software libraries.
5. follow the release version installation instructions to complete the installation.

Useful Links

• Web site: https://collectiveaccess.org
• Documentation: https://manual.collectiveaccess.org
• Demo: https://demo.collectiveaccess.org/
• Installation instructions: https://manual.collectiveaccess.org/providence/user/setup/installation.html
• Release Notes:
  • https://manual.collectiveaccess.org/release_notes
• Forum: https://www.collectiveaccess.org/support

To report issues please use GitHub Issues: https://github.com/collectiveaccess/providence/issues

Other modules

Pawtucket2: https://github.com/collectiveaccess/pawtucket2 (The public access front-end application for Providence)

providence's Issues

Disabled Record Types showing in Relationship types

If you disable using a record type like tours or movements, they still show in the relationship types.
Is there a way to remove them from here to clean the interface up?

Interstitial paperclip shows up on History tracking when there is no UI available.