Spacefinder

This repository contains a jekyll theme version of the UI for the Cambridge Spacefinder application (https://spacefinder.lib.cam.ac.uk/). It has been built to investigate possibilities for development of the application to make it usable in other higher education contexts.

The major change made to the original application (https://github.com/cambridge-collection/spacefinder/) is the decoupling of the application into User Interface and server-side components. Here, the data for all spaces is served as JSON files rather than using a data endpoint driven by a server-side application.

For more information about the project, please visit the Spacefinder UI wiki

An example of the application when populated with data is available in the University of Leeds version of Spacefinder, which is available at https://spacefinder.leeds.ac.uk/ and served from the repository uol-library/spacefinder.leeds.ac.uk.

Using this repository

This repository can be forked or used as a jekyll theme in GitHub to create a custom wayfinding application. Key files which require customising with your own information are:

• _config.yml - the main Jekyll configuration file
• _includes/pages/ - directory containing your about page, accessibility statement and privacy statement
• _includes/favicons.html - site icon collection
• _includes/top-bar.html - site logo (inline SVG or images)

If you are using this repository as a jekyll theme, you need to add remote_theme: uol-library/spacefinder to _config.yml

Data configuration

• Data for spaces is kept in JSON files within the spaces directory.
• Spaces are rendered using functions in the file _includes/javascript/templates.js
• Filters for spaces are defined in the file _data/config.yml

Spaces must have the following pieces of metadata defined for them:

• id - a unique numerical identifier for each space. This is used in the filename of the JSON file in the spaces directory, i.e. a space with the ID of 2 stors its data in the file spaces/2.json
• title - name of the space
• slug - usually the lower case title with all special characters and spaces removed
• location - latitude / longitude values in GeoJSON format.
• description - Short description of the space
• opening_hours - this is a JSON data structure consisting of weekday names as keys, and properties open (boolean), from (time in HH:MM format) and to (time in HH:MM format).

Other metadata fields can be defined in the JSON data, along with filter information for each space (using keys defined in _data/config.yml). This data should then be incorporated into the output of the templates in _includes/javascript/templates.js.

Icon Font

Spacefinder uses a font to display different icons which can be customised using https://fontello.com.

The fontello configuration is in the file assets/font/src/config.json which you can import into fontello if you want to add and remove icons. Once you have finished customising the font, download the package from fontello and replace the content of your assets/font/src folder with it. The package contains the font (in five formats) and a CSS file assets/font/src/css/spacefinder.css which can be used to replace the icon CSS file in _sass/spacefinder.scss. The only change made to this file is applying the global icon style to the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements which allows for the inclusion of two icons together in parts of the UI.

Changelog

0.9 (10/1/2023)

• Initial release of code based on https://github.com/uol-library/spacefinder-ui