Adding the "Addthis" toolbar to your Dspace site
Addthis is a great way to make a website look fancy without doing much work. In the most simple of senses it is a bookmarklet that will transport the page you are looking at to a huge stack of different web based services. Stuff like Delicious, FURL, Facebook etc. The extra bonus is that there is no cost involved and setup doesn't take very long. If you've been developing in a CMS or with a consistent template system it should be a trivial task.
Since Dspace is my most current project I thought it would be a good idea to include the Addthis button to that as well. Now Dspace is a bit of a bear when it comes to rendering pages so it won't be as straight forward as with a PHP or HTML site.
I'm currently working with Dspace 1.5 using the Manakin UI.
- Signup for a Addthis account, once that is done generate your button code
- You'll need to hack some of the XLI files that are used to render the page. In particular .../webapps/xmlui/themes/dri2xhml/structural.xsl (depending on where you installed Dspace). This file is invoked when the page is rendered. The easiest way to do it is to add the button code from the previous set into <div id="ds-footer-links"> where the 'Contact Us' and 'Feedback' link are. The usual copy/paste ought to do it.
- Be sure to preface the seperator text after you Addthis code so that you get a lovely pipe symbol between the two links: <xsl:text> | </xsl:text>
Before
After
Extra Credit
To make it look even better you could plop it in a new Div tag and define where/what it will look like. For the default theme that would be .../webapps/xmlui/themes/Reference/lib/style.css (Depending on where you installed Dspace)
