GeoNetwork, Me, and a Rubber Mallet (Pt. 4)
So last time it was on and on about how we’re trying to live-edit a GeoNetwork checkout by essentially creating a parallel copy of it right next to the original code. I used the word “alternatize,” which isn’t a word really, to describe how, for any file we add to or edit in GeoNetwork, we add a pseudo extension like “_pugo” to mark that it’s been touched by grubby hands. 
This works well, but you have to be sure that all files that point to your new file know that its name has been changed (and this is upwardly-cascading, of course), so that if you edit a file to point to your new “_pugo” version of something, you then have to edit that file by adding “_pugo,” which means you must make sure all files that point to or include that file are altered and so on and so on. It makes much more sense when you have files in front of you and I don’t want to beat this horse any more than I have already. Do it differently or better or not at all if you want. We don’t have any real genius to be telling you how to keep your shit together.
Anyway, it was all a big bore and there are only a few people reading this series anyway. But those that do AND are interested in GeoNetwork might like this one better — it’s brush-clearing day in the GN user interface. The first problem I ever had with GeoNetwork was its cluttered, complicated, 1.0-esque UI. It’s surprising, too, because it has some cool shit going on (geoRSS, ajax pulls of metadata results, dynamic mapping of data attached to found records). You can see slightly customized versions at fao.org or unocha.org. Both are good examples of how GeoNetwork is quite powerful out of the box, really, but also how it appears to not be in tune with how usability and web design has gone in recent years (no offense, I hope). And if you’re thinking “aw, don’t be a prick — it’s FOSS4G,” I dare you to click the “Advanced Search” form option. In fact I’ll give you 20m to try and fill out that form.
Lest you still think I’m being hard on this project, remember what my own profession thought was acceptable for the last fifteen years (and in many places still to this day). Exhibits A and B. And for obvious reasons that constitute a pretty good excuse — when those 20 minutes of form-filling are up you’ve constructed a very powerful and accurate search. But there are better ways to do it and that’s one of the primary objectives of this project — to present a sleek, minimalist interface to all these datasets without sacrificing the real power of the system (just hiding it).
So the first thing on my list was to severely cut back the intitial impression of the site, and the first thing to go was the table-based front page layout. It wasn’t that hard, really, I just went in and cut out almost all inputs, form widgets, and intermap stuff. Then in what was left all table elements were replaced with divs or spans and styled with a custom css. This mostly just took trial and error, and it’s still not done. Why? Well it needs to be cleaned up for good, for one thing (some stuff didn’t get axed because I couldn’t tell what it was doing). But also because that fucking Internet Explorer is doing funky things with div clears and widths. I hate it so much.
Anyway, I know this is sort of a step-through series of how we’re actually doing this stuff, but this main page customization takes virtually no skill — I just kept chopping and styling, chopping and styling until I was left with this (draft):
…which is better than the way it was, in my opinion:
