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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +layout: post |
| 3 | +title: 'CollectionBuilder Bulletin: January 2025' |
| 4 | +subtitle: |
| 5 | +author: Devin Becker |
| 6 | +publish-date: January 10, 2024 |
| 7 | +tags: [newsletter] |
| 8 | +short_description: 'A round-up for January 2025.' |
| 9 | +--- |
| 10 | +Hi Everyone, |
| 11 | + |
| 12 | +We have **a lot of updates** with the new year. The team went for a retreat in |
| 13 | +November to beautiful McCall, Idaho. Evan made us watch a hockey game (which ended up being amazing) and we got a lot of work done, both on the core of CollectionBuilder and on some new features. |
| 14 | + |
| 15 | +And then in less fun news, Evan's been discovering issues with an update to the Jekyll action that builds CollectionBuilder-CSV websites on GitHub and with the latest Ruby update. No worries we have fixes (see below), but both issues will likely cause some frustration unfortunately. |
| 16 | + |
| 17 | +As always, If you have a project and/or event you’d like us to highlight next month please email [collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com](mailto:collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com). |
| 18 | + |
| 19 | +\- The CollectionBuilder Team (Devin writing this ...) |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | +## **This month’s news:** |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +### We took a retreat\! |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +The CollectionBuilder Team took a short retreat during which we worked on some long standing issues and developed some new features. |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +**Boring (but Important) Updates to CB-CSV:** The CollectionBuilder-CSV repository received several minor, non-breaking updates last week during a team retreat, including: |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | + - normalized and documented Index includes |
| 30 | + - a significant reorganization of Rake tasks into a dedicated "rakelib/" folder for improved manageability. |
| 31 | + - Several new utility tasks were also added for working with objects, including download_by_csv, rename_by_csv, rename_lowercase, and resize_images, with corresponding documentation available in the docs/rake_tasks directory. |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | +These updates are currently only available in the main branch of CB-CSV and are intended for new projects, with no need to update existing implementations unless new functionality is desired. While more substantial changes with breaking updates are in development, these modifications are currently exclusive to CB-CSV, with plans to eventually roll out compatible changes to CB-GH and CB-Sheets platforms. |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +**Exciting updates!:** |
| 36 | + |
| 37 | +We also built some cool things, several of which are not quite ready for prime time (but email us if you want to live dangerously): |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | + - ***a new gallery feature*** -- this feature will allow you to create a gallery on any CB page, with options for a featured image at the top. The include lets you filter your collection to a curated group of items from your collection. |
| 40 | + - This came out of work on a DHSI collection this past summer by Briar Pelletier. She added several galleries of prints based on the year they were featured. [See 2016 here!](https://briarpelletier.github.io/maps-archive/galleries/2016.html) |
| 41 | + - ***a revised about page*** -- Olivia is working on a major revision of the about page that automatically generates a table of contents at the top right and changes the basic size of the text block. It looks a lot better and we're excited to roll that out this spring. |
| 42 | + - ***a cb-essay repository***-- I've been working on a repository that takes some of Evan's work on [Fire Lines](https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/fire-lines/) and some of my work with a recent CDIL fellow (CDIL is our DH center at the University of Idaho) that will help people use CollectionBuilder to publish long form essays with a collection underneath. There will be options for stepping through the essay and also for a scroll-based experience -- you can see a example of how that should work in [an essay on our new project Keeping Watch](https://cdil.lib.uidaho.edu/keeping-watch/essay/). |
| 43 | + |
| 44 | +### There are some breaking issues with new releases (not our fault!) |
| 45 | + |
| 46 | +* **Issues with the latest GitHub Jekyll Action** \- |
| 47 | + |
| 48 | +There is currently an issue with the default GitHub Action for Jekyll that causes build errors for both new and existing repositories following CollectionBuilder's deployment instructions. Two temporary solutions are available: |
| 49 | + |
| 50 | +If you want to manually fix it for now--> in your repository, edit the file ".github/workflows/jekyll.yml". Go to line 32, where it says `runs-on: ubuntu-latest` and replace it with `runs-on: ubuntu-22.04` |
| 51 | + |
| 52 | +This will restore it to the older image which still works correctly! |
| 53 | + |
| 54 | +You can also update the ruby/setup-ruby version to use: ruby/setup-ruby@v1.207.0 (line 37). |
| 55 | + |
| 56 | +This issue has been documented in the [CollectionBuilder-CSV repository](https://github.com/CollectionBuilder/collectionbuilder-csv/issues/96) and added to the [documentation](https://collectionbuilder.github.io/cb-docs/docs/deploy/actions/). |
| 57 | + |
| 58 | +Eventually, we assume someone will fix the default "jekyll.yml" ... |
| 59 | + |
| 60 | +* **Issues with the latest Ruby release** \- |
| 61 | + |
| 62 | +An issue has emerged with Jekyll compatibility in Ruby versions 3.4.0 and above, where Jekyll's dependencies haven't been updated to match Ruby's standard library changes. Users running recent Ruby versions may experience warning messages in the terminal, while Ruby 3.4.1 users may encounter errors preventing Jekyll from running (bundle exec jekyll s). To resolve this, CollectionBuilder-CSV's Gemfile has been updated with the required dependencies. |
| 63 | + |
| 64 | +**For existing projects** experiencing these issues, users should delete their current "Gemfile" and "Gemfile.lock" files and replace them with the updated Gemfile from CollectionBuilder-CSV (https://github.com/CollectionBuilder/collectionbuilder-csv/blob/main/Gemfile). |
| 65 | + |
| 66 | +New collections using the latest CB-CSV template should work without modification. |
| 67 | + |
| 68 | + |
| 69 | +## **Get Involved / Connect with Us** |
| 70 | + |
| 71 | +Below are some ways to stay connected with the CollectionBuilder community: |
| 72 | +* [Join our Slack channel](https://forms.gle/GVb7STSWyq2tto3NA) |
| 73 | +* Post questions on our [GitHub Discussion Board](https://github.com/orgs/CollectionBuilder/discussions) |
| 74 | +Questions? Email us at [collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com](mailto:collectionbuilder.team@gmail.com) |
| 75 | + |
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