[Medin_standards] Comments on the Metadata editor tool on the website

[Steven Gontarek]

Hi Folks,

 
Just had the pleasure of using the tool on the MEDIN (or rather dassh website) to produce a couple of records and have the following comments\suggestions to make. They are in no particular order - some might just be peculiar to the way I like to work, however others might be more general:
 
- Home page - example of 'light blue' box is just white
 
- Can there be a way to change your password  ?
 
- When editting a record I sometimes forget which record I am working on - the title is often only visible under the first tab "Identification". It might be useful to have this displayed when in any of the tabs. The problem in this case was that I was working on two closely related records and kept forgetting which I was on....
 
- Cannot edit more than one record at a time. Most browsers have tabbed  pages these days - I was able to open two different records in separate tabs - and then the fun began... It got awfully confused about which record to update. I think we either need to prevent this happening or deal with it.
 
- Data format help under "Identification" doesn't appear to be working.
 
- I tried this in a couple of browsers - Chrome seems to working okay, but can't expand the 'free-text' input boxes in IE8 or Firefox. In Chrome I can click on a corner of the box and it increases it's size - makes editting a lot easier
 
-The Map tool. didn't use that in the end - just entered the coords manually. I realise that this is just a generation tool, but it might be useful to autiomatically reposition the map if coordinates are manually entered (or when re-visting the page during a further edit) - a sort of confirmation that the lat longs are correct (and in the right fields !)
 
- I would prefer a save button on each page. I typed something in, and rather than click the 'next tab' button, just went to home - and it forgot the changes I made
 
- Some of the keyword selection boxes are a bit small - particularly when making multiple selections. Would it be possible to increase their height either dynamically or by a diffrent page layout (e.g. side by side). Also what about showing dynamically in an adjacent box the selections a user has made ? This could be quite fiddly - forget to press ctrl or accidently press shift and you end up messing up any multiple selections and have to end up scrolling through the lists again (if you actually spot your mistake !)
 
- Can we put an export button on the metadata tab of a record (i.e. export current record), in addtion to going to having to go to the Export button and reselect the record
 
- the date fields are obvioulsy in MySQL format if entered (yyyy-mm-dd), but it will still accept a date in the uk format (dd-mm-yyyy) - only problem is  that when you go back to that page it does something weird and wonderfully with it.. We may need some type checking for some fields.
 
Now all that being said, I was still able to produce my record a lot easier this way than having to manually create it, however some of the above suggestions might make it even more easier to use. I'm not being derogatory about scientists ;-), but I've seen a lot of them get unstuck on some sites a lot simpler than this.....
 
 
Steve
 
 
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