This page is about AcademicPress, a branch from Netblog 2 (another WordPress plugin). It is designed and implemented from scratch, using all previous experiences and user feedback collected with Netblog 2, and bringing correct, easy handling and formatting of bibliography styles and references to any website and to WordPress as a plugin. Notable features: BibTeX and EndNote parser, bibliography database queries, custom portable citation styles, footnotes, open-source and free. Visit the homepage to get more information about the current public release.
Motivation
Academic publishing is primarily done via LaTex. However, most institutions, university faculties, commercial companies (R&D department) and interest groups either publish an excerpt or a list of their scientific work on their privately maintained homepages. Although detail and accurateness might not be reached by web publishing, like via static HTML pages or via dynamic weblog posts, such platforms still intrinsically miss “just bit more” academically favored citations, references and linking to other resources – the most popular exception might be Wikipedia.org which already does references on a good level for online purposes. But most sites obviously don’t do. WordPress is just one popular weblog platform – having a great for a plugin to fill this gab, while providing an easy to use and well structured plugin organization, along with intuitive user interfaces. AcademicPress is currently available as a WordPress plugin featuring additional user interfaces and wizards for creating content. In general, AcademicPress will be used on any website – it will have no additional dependencies, except a modern web browser.
Features
Linking to Web Resources Made Easy
Connect Resources: Easily link to other websites from within your posts, using a well-defined structure which the plugin recognizes to extract these links and display them on the final public webpage using WordPress widgets. With widgets, links can be placed anywhere in your webpage, depending you the functionality of the chosen theme. The defined structure supports hierarchical ordering of links, with custom defined link title and link URL. Additionally, links can be grouped together into categories, each being displayed with a separate title (the category). All data is defined in the well-known WordPress editor, having a lot of advantages. 1: no additional windows and user interfaces are needed, making the whole experience easier because less information is displayed. 2: All maintenance operations are automatically inherited from WordPress Core, e.g. backup and restore of posts, searching for links is equivalent to searching in posts. 3: Easier plugin development, update and maintenance having less source code, which implies an execution speedup for web server requests.
References Made Easy
Academic Work On The Web: Coupled with the power of WordPress shortcodes, bibliographic references, footnotes, caption numbers can be easily defined in the editor, while AcademicPress takes care about correct numbering, linking and formatting of citations which is done via default or customized citation styles. Default citation styles are APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, Harvard. They are based on SDL, a Style Definition Language introduced by this software. SDL enables the (advanced) user to easily define and share their own citation styles. Such definitions are translated into fast executable PHP code acting like a filter upon citation parameters, like author, name, title, year etc. and returning a well-defined formatted output. Parse BibTex, EndNote strings returned from publishing sites. Reference data can be stored either statically (hard coded on webpage), or dynamically (via links to external files containing BibTex, EndNote data or via queries to bibliography databases). Table of references, footnotes and captions will be automatically created where the user has specified its position (Web based) or automatically at the end of each posts (WP plugin). Interactive UI and wizards helps the user to create the content. Footnotes are supported to enhance the flow of content of a given post.
LaTex Math for Professsional Made Easy
Professional Math Made Easy And Nice: Most website obviously suffer from anything but properly formatted mathematical equations, implications, characters and so on. Forums are famous for this problem. Having modern web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and fast browsers, such problems should not be a problem anymore. With Netblog, you can easily copy and paste LaTex Math into your WordPress editor, resulting in a nice display of your math.
Manage Content: Links can become broken, post content and shortcode structure definitions may change with newer versions of Netblog (in case of new features and enhancements). In math mode, macros as known from LaTex Math may be defined so that complex reoccurring commands need not to be repeated every time. Citation style definitions can be created, removed, updated, uploaded from portable SDL files being based on XML – exchangeable meta language. Such styles can be disabled.
Internationalization Supported: The academic society is globalized. For this, internationalization is required – however, English is the default language, of course. German, French, Spanish and many others can be available.
Modularized Plugin: Modules like bibliography, linking and math can be activated or disabled as needed to enhance performance: the server should only compute those things the user actually needs!