DH-Boilerplate

A bare-bones (work-in-progress) Laravel 4 app setup for Digital Humanities projects. This is not a completed app, just a skeleton with useful back- and front-end libraries, etc included. It won't do much out-of-the-box.

Delete the stuff you don't need to use.

##Requirements

• Meet the Laravel Requirements
• Have Composer installed (for managing the PHP dependencies)
• Have Bower installed (for managing the front-end dependencies)
• Install Grunt for managing the front-end build process

##Configuration:

1. Run composer install
2. Run php artisan key:generate to generate a new application key
3. If using User Accounts, run php artisan auth:reminders and php artisan migrate
4. Fill in the details in /app/config/author.php (and, optionally, the config files for geo.php and europeana.php)
5. Visit /public and run bower install to install the suggested Javascript packages (you need to have Bower installed)

##Routes

####Static Pages View files for these can be found in /app/views/static

• /about
• /about/team
• /about/contact
• /about/development

Routes are also declared for

• /docs (see DocReader section below)
• /api/v1 - this route group is intended as a starting point for the app's API

##Resources

There's a basic catalogue resource declared in app/routes.php as a starting point for building an item catalogue.

Take a look at app/controllers/CatalogueController.php for its setup. There is a simple catalogue search, and a CSV import function included - you can configure the fields searched and imported in app/models/Catalogue.php.

View templates are in app/views/catalogue, with localisation options for headings, labels, etc held in app/lang/en/catalogue.php and app/lang/en/messages.php.

To set it up, run the database migration provided. You can optionally seed the database with a single test record, or import a CSV to seed the database (look at /app/database/seeds/CatalogueTableDataSeeder.php). Alter the migration schema and update the Catalogue model at app/models/Catalogue.php to extend it.

##Front-end related

There is some NUIG branding included (as this was created for NUIG projects) - you can delete that from the app/views/layout/layout_main.blade.php file if using for a non-NUIG project.

####LESS The skeleton uses LESS for stylesheets. You'll need to use a pre-processor on them to generate the CSS - (CodeKit and Prepos are worth a look)...or you can use Grunt (there's a GruntFile included). Large parts of the styling are built on Twitter Bootstrap 3.0.*

####JavaScript It includes a number of JavaScript libraries at /public/js/bower_components/. Versions can be set/updated running bower install on /public/bower.json

• d3 d3/d3.min.js
• jQuery jquery/jquery.min.js
• Leaflet.js leaflet/dist/leaflet.js
• Modernizr modernizr/modernizr.js (there's a .min.js version, but that's created by CodeKit, and is not downloaded as part of the library)

Grunt

To use Grunt, update /public/package.json and /public/Gruntfile.js as required, and run npm install in /public.

##External Components

###DocsReader The documentation is handled by the integrated DocsReader which produces documentation from Markdown files. You can find the markdown source in /docs. (/docs/documentation.md contains the left side navigation).

##Recommended

###JSON-LD

If this JSON-LD Processor is included, the API will return compacted JSON-LD data. You will need to update the Context in /models/Catalogue.php to their correct Schema.org (or other) values.

If adding the Processor, you can put it in /app/helpers and require it in /app/start/global.php.

###Backups

Add the following to /composer.json

"heybigname/backup-manager": "dev-master",
"dropbox/dropbox-sdk": "dev-master"

...and follow the installation instructions in the project's GitHub Readme. For Dropbox backups, you can configure a new Dropbox App through the through the Dropbox Developer Portal.

###Other options Some other optional integrations are included in the NOTES.md file.