MOREL

MOREL generates web sites from bibliographic collections. The MOREL sites gather book covers, excerpts, bibliographic clues, metadata and digital downloads from items stored in the Zotero reference manager.

Works are organized by dynamic lists, which automatically group the works according to common characteristics:

MOREL also has a search engine that allows you to find works directly.

Instructions to install the theme

Install

Local (using command line)

  • Fork the repository — that is, create a copy in your GitHub account.
  • Open your system’s terminal in the folder on your local computer where you will be working on the site. Mac and Linux have native terminals. For Windows, use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux).
  • Run:
    $ git clone https://github.com/[your_username]/morel-theme-generator
    

    to clone the repository.

  • Run:
    $ cd morel-theme-generator
    

    to move to the repository folder.

  • Run:
    bundle update
    

    to update the theme and its dependencies. If you don’t have Ruby on your system, follow the instructions in Jekyll

  • Run:
    ruby serve-local.rb
    

    to launch the test site locally.

Customize

You now have a ready-made site with sample content from the MOREL site Afro Latin American Writers in Translation (ALAWiT).

To fill it with your site’s information, follow these steps:

  • Open _config.yml and change:
    • The title to your site’s.
    • The tagline to your site’s.
    • The email and/or social media accounts to your site’s.
    • The jotform link (create your free account at https://www.jotform.com/).
  • Open the file _about/site-description.md and write a description for your site. The <!-- more --> line separates what appears in the footer across all pages from the longer description that appears on the about page only. For this to work you have to complete the final step of this section.
  • Replace the logo, pattern and avatar files by adding a file to:
    • assets/img/tema/logo.png
    • assets/img/tema/avatar.jpg
    • assets/img/tema/trama.png
    • assets/img/tema/add.jpg
  • Open the podcast.md file and change the title and tagline of your podcast or blog.
  • The _posts folder has the MOREL posts. Delete the MOREL posts and create your own with Jekyll nomenclature. If you don’t want to add any podcast posts or episodes to your site, change in _config.yml the podcast value to false
  • Commit the changes and wait for the customized site to deploy. If you are using GitHub in the web browser, just wait the site to deploy. If you are working locally, push the changes to see them online, or test them locally with
    ruby serve-local.rb
    

Generating the content from Zotero

Local (using command line)

  • Open Zotero and review the guide at the end of this instructions to make the fields 100 % readable for MOREL.

  • Export your Zotero collection as a .csv file. If you don’t know how to do it follow the instructions here.

  • Name your .csv file books_zotero.csv and place it inside the assets/data folder.

  • Run:
    python3 -m venv assets/env
    

    to create the Python environment.

  • Run:
    source assets/env/bin/activate
    

    to activate the Python environment.

  • Run:
    pip install -r requirements.txt
    

    to install the dependencies.

  • Run:
    python3 assets/env/src/cleanup_output.py
    

    to delete the sample content.

  • Run:
    python3 assets/env/src/morel-generate.py
    

    to generate your content

  • Run:
    ruby serve-local.rb
    

    to activate the local server for browsing.

  • Open the browser and go to the link provided by the local server (usually it’s http://127.0.0.1:4000).
  • Browse your custom site!

Zotero Fields

MOREL items are added in the same way that items are added in any Zotero library. In its current version, MOREL can only process items of type book. Since not all the fields needed for MOREL are available for the book content type, some considerations must be made:

  • Excerpt: the fragment from each MOREL record corresponds to the notes of Zotero (see the documentation about Zotero notes). In its current version, MOREL only accepts one excerpt per book.
  • Cover: the cover is a jpg file that is added as an attachment to the Zotero item (see the Zotero attachments documentation).