Output Styles

I know you've heard this before, but there is some behind the scenes development going in conjunction with the Zotero (http://dev.zotero.org/creating_citation_styles) and Xbiblio (http://xbiblio.sourceforge.net/) folks. Basically Zotero uses a style markup language called CSL from the Xbiblio project, and they have, or are in the process of, developing a large number of styles (http://www.zotero.org/styles).

Now Zotero is written in JavaScript and thus uses JS to parse the CSL files and create formated bibliographic output. I am currently porting the JS to PHP for use in this module and will then have access to any styles created for Zotero.

That's the plan anyway. I'll have a better idea in a few weeks if it will come to fruition but it looks hopeful. The other part of this plan is that you will be able to automatically update your styles from the Zotero repository, thus staying current with future developments and additions there.

I can't argue the house cleaning point. The issue there is there is no (that I know of) way for me to change the status en mass, and thus have to wade through them one by one, which takes a tremendous amount of time (which I don't have a lot of to spare ;-).

I suppose I should raise this with the module developer, but I just haven't got around to it yet.

Ron.

What's the status of PHP for Chicago and MLA styles? I don't see anything in the repo. Even if it's unfinished, a patch of current status would be great. I need this soon, so would be happy to finish up old work here.

The styles are quite easy to customize, just copy one of the biblio_styles_xxx.inc files to another name, the module will automatically
recognize it, then just edit the code with any text editor.
Look for "if (!empty ($node->biblio_something))
$output. .= blabla
lines and change the order or field names as you like.

I tried to customize a iso690 output style,it runs ok in rc3.But when I update to rc4,I choose my iso690 style and sumbmit,browser is blank.
I don't kwnow where wrong. I customize it on ieee style base,and add some code.are those line wrong?I add
if (!empty ($node->biblio_contributors[4]))
$authors = theme('biblio_authors', $node->biblio_contributors[4], 'iso690', 4, $inline);
$output .= 'Translated by '. $authors ."; \n";

below:

if (!empty ($node->biblio_number))
$output .= ', no. ' . check_plain($node->biblio_number);

There was a change between RC2 and RC4 in terms of how the style files work so you might want to double check the file you based you new style on for changes.

@Pete: I feel your pain, and to be fair... "Two and a half years and no progress" is not quite true, it's actually "Two and a half years and no progress that I am aware of". In the intervening time I have explored an number of options and partially wrote a CiteProc processor for CSL in PHP. In theory this would provide a large number of styles via the Zotero CLS repository.

In fact this proposal was very nearly part of last summers Google Summer of Code (http://groups.drupal.org/node/9815) it had been accepted but the student didn't pan out so it had to be withdrawn.

This idea is not dead, however this is a non trivial project and like I have said before, there is only so much I can do.

The irony here is that I was working on another solution (much of it borrowed from refbase) just as you made this comment :-) so it's actually more likely than you might think.

@schuyler1d: I've started an MLA style file (I actually hijacked some style files from refbase and am converting them for use here, which will save me a ton of research time). It's not quite done yet, but if you want to look it's in CVS HEAD I'll probably be able to hack these out in a few days.

FYI, MLA is now in the -dev version.

Ron.

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