PhpBibliography 0.4 - web based bibliography system

I've released version 0.4 of PhpBibliography, http://phpbibliography.sourceforge.net, a web based bibliography system that allows you to publish your bibliography online (and to edit it via web). It is implemented in Php and uses MySql. This is free software, open source, released under GPL.

There are many new features in this release (I hope you find useful).

First of all, you can also modify a paper by using a bibtex (previously you could only insert a new paper by using a bibtex). For this reason, the bibtexkey field was added to the database (and w.t.r. I added also the function in the admin menu to automatically generate bibtex key for papers which do not have it yet). Furthermore, you can also upload an entire bib file; this will allow you to set up the bibliography site with only one action (of course you'll then be able to modify each inserted paper).

Papers can now be classified according to several criteria (called classifications), not only by using categories. You can add new classifications, and for each classification you'll be able to add values that can be associated to papers. For instance, you can have the classification "keyword", the classification "status" with values "submitted", "to appear", "published", etc. This is very useful also for (virtually) adding a new field to the paper table structure. Classifications can be related to a specific bibtex field, so that they can be retrieved from bibtexs (and also generated in the corresponding field, during the automatic bibtex generation).

A functionality was added (available from the admin menu) that allows you to "merge two authors" that, due to a mistake, represent the same author. (This usually happens when inserting a paper through a bibtex.) For instance you have two authors Foo Bar and Foo T. Bar that represent the same author. With this function, the system will replace the second author with the first author (i.e., the second author will be deleted and all the papers that were associated to the second author will be associated to the first author).

From the paper presentation point of view some customization features were added: you can pass additional parameters in the URL (you can also specify them in the config.php file, but the ones passed on the URL will take the precedence). Here we list these parameters (in the URL they must be passed without the $, using the GET passing method syntax) and their default values:

• $printfilenames = "1"
  This tells the paper formatter whether to name the link to the paper source using the complete name of the file (e.g., my_paper.ps.gz). If set to "0", then only the extension of the file will be shown (e.g., ps.gz).
• $linktodetails = "1"
  The title of the paper will link to a separate page with complete details about that paper. If set to "0", no link will be generated.
• $noheader = "0"
  If set to "1" the generated page will contain no header information (i.e., it will not even contain the css definitions). This is useful when you want to include the output of phpbibliography into another web page and you want customize it with your own css definitions.
• $paperorder
  Specify the sorting criteria of the shown papers. For the moment the only possible value for this parameter is title (meaning that papers will be ordered according to their title).

For instance, the following screenshot shows the output where printfilenames is set to "1"
while the next one shows the output where printfilenames is set to "0"
Finally, some bugs were fixed (in particular the authentication problem in php 5, due to the use of wrong variable names, see also this post on this blog).

Hope you enjoy this new version of PhpBibliography (yeah, I know, the logo is not that beauty, but that's just the beginning :-)