ALP leverages the powerful WordPress platform to provide an electronic laboratory notebook fit for academic and scientific purposes. It's free, open source, regularly updated and attempts to be minimally invasive on the core WordPress functionality.
Lots of documentation is provided on the ALP website.
Before installing, please read and understand the Development plans in the context of WordPress upgrades
section below. It explains how new features in WordPress will be tracked by ALP.
ALP is under development, and not feature-complete. While it is being used daily and without much issue by a large organisation of around 100 scientists, there are surely still some bugs waiting to be discovered. If you choose to use ALP, please report any unexpected behaviour. The developer is also willing to help with any installation or setup queries you might have - please get in touch.
ALP makes many extensive additions and modifications to WordPress. Most of the features below are modular, allowing them to be switched on and off via settings.
ALP allows multiple authors to be assigned to single posts. When writing a post, the user can specify their coauthors using the sidebar. These extra names are then shown in order on the post page, and the posts appear on each coauthor's archive page and are included in their post counts.
When editing a published post or page, a user is able to specify an edit summary detailing the changes they have made. This edit summary appears under the post or page when using the Labbook theme, with a link to the WordPress admin screen showing the changeset (like the "diff" on Wikipedia).
A new admin screen is also provided, allowing users to navigate the complete history of changes to posts and pages.
When a post or page links to another post or page on the same site, the corresponding post or page is shown in a list under the other post or page. This creates a web of links between posts and pages. This is particularly useful for finding out whether newer posts on a particular topic have been made, as long as the author of the newer post remembered to link back to the older one. This feature acts like a bit like a "related posts" list on other websites.
ALP tracks whether logged-in users have read new posts. When a new post is made, everyone except the post's author sees the new post as unread, designated in the Labbook theme using a closed envelope icon next to the post title. When the user reads the post (by clicking the title to visit the post's single page), the post is marked as read (designated in Labbook with an open envelope). In Labbook, users can manually mark a post as read or unread by clicking the envelope. Users can also click a link in the top bar to view a list of all unread posts.
When a post undergoes significant edits, a post is again marked as unread to all users except the author.
ALP adds an inventory system to allow you to create pages for inventory items. These pages can be used as a central place to store e.g. manuals, schematics, images, etc., and the system lets your users tag posts with inventory items which then provides links to these pages under the corresponding posts.
When used with the Labbook theme, ALP adds advanced search capabilities allowing users to search by categories, tags, coauthors, dates, and keywords. Users can also disallow posts made by certain users or with certain categories or tags, and search for posts with only certain subsets of users, categories or tags.
ALP lets you force users to be logged in to view the site content, keeping the contents private to outside users.
Advanced search may be switched off for non-logged-in users to avoid computationally expensive searches.
Note: images are still accessible when the direct link is known - this is a shortcoming in WordPress itself. This can in most cases be mitigated with appropriate HTTP server configuration.
ALP adds a TeX block to the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0, allowing users to create equations. The equation is rendered within the editor so the user can check their markup, and the markup can be edited later alongside the rest of the post.
ALP adds the ability to merge tags and categories in bulk.
ALP prevents posts being published with the "Uncategorized" category if the author has specified another category. In such cases, the "Uncategorized" category is silently removed.
ALP modifies pages to work more like wiki pages. When using the Labbook theme, authors and dates are removed from the title area, a breadcrumb trail is shown back to the home page, and there is an option to generate and show tables of contents for each page.
The XML-RPC is disabled by ALP, since this is an old scheme which is entirely superceded in functionality by the REST API.
Settings are provided to disable post trackbacks and social media embed blocks, since these are usually only useful for commercial sites.
When used on a network, extra media (MIME) types can be specified in addition to the core WordPress ones, to allow your users to upload special files without triggering securty errors.
Some WordPress branding is removed from the admin dashboard pages.
A tool is provided to allow the administrators to change user roles en-masse, to make them more suitable for academic contexts:
- Administrator is unchanged
- Editor is renamed Researcher
- Author is renamed Intern
- Contributor is removed
- Subscriber is unchanged
- Excluded is added (for keeping ex-users' posts, comments, etc. on record but not giving them access)
ALP is intended to be used with the specially created "Labbook" theme, which supports display of multiple authors, edit summaries, cross-references, etc. provided by ALP.
See the themes repository for more details.
ALP can be uninstalled via the normal procedure, using the plugin page in the admin area. Upon uninstallation, all of these changes made by ALP are reversed and all additions to the database are removed, with the only exception being the user groups. If you have converted user groups using the included tool, then these will remain as they are. You can manually change user groups using other plugins. One day ALP may provide a tool to reverse user group changes, but this is not a high priority.
An up-to-date version of WordPress is required. The exact requirement is listed in README.txt in
the plugin directory.
It is desirable, but not required, to use WordPress in multisite mode. This exposes additional options to network administrators to control upload media (MIME) types and custom script paths.
The plugin has only been tested on and only supports PHP 7. You must have the DOM extension installed in order for the page table of contents lists provided by the Labbook theme to work. You also cannot use PHP via CGI if you wish to make the site private but still have syndication feeds available to the user.
Your users should use up-to-date browsers. The Labbook theme uses CSS Grid, which is a web standard only supported in relatively recent browsers (i.e. within the last three years) of the most popular browsers. The browsers that don't support CSS Grid represent only around 5% of global usage as of March 2018. There are very little legitimate reasons to use outdated browsers, and this project is not concerned about losing sales from users running them!
- Clean code: there's an awful lot of terribly written code in the WordPress ecosystem. This plugin attempts to conform to coding standards, and to interfere minimally with the default WordPress behaviour where possible.
- Modular: most features can be enabled or disabled via the settings page, and work independently from each other. The plugin can also be used without the corresponding theme, though this hides a lot of the useful parts of the plugin from users.
The basic behaviour of ALP is already in place, but the plan is to keep adding useful features as ALP is used by researchers and the developer gets feedback. Please take a look at the project's issue tracker to view, comment on and add your own feature requests for future releases.
The intention is for ALP to track the latest improvements to WordPress and Gutenberg as much as possible. Any feature that is provided by ALP that becomes available in WordPress Core will probably be removed from ALP quite soon after. The author does not have enough time to support many different versions of WordPress, and so the latest release will always be the focus. If a new core WordPress feature is released in the future that does something very similar to what ALP provides, then it is likely that the corresponding ALP feature will be removed. If in order to avoid breaking installations, some maintenance is required, instructions will be provided for system administrators to perform the necessary changes and the ALP release removing the feature will be given a new major version number.
WordPress is in a period of transition: the new Gutenberg editor has introduced a completely different way of writing content. The feature roadmap shows a plan to eventually replace most of the configurable parts of WordPress with Gutenberg-based assets.
Some changes of particular note are:
- The navigation menu and sidebar will probably eventually be converted to use Gutenberg blocks, with existing widgets and menu configurations becoming "legacy" types. The widgets provided by ALP will likely therefore be made into blocks.
- There is a possibility that a table of contents block will become part of the core WordPress block library (see this, this and this). The ALP table of contents block is auto-generated on page load, so it probably won't disrupt too much to use the new block instead.
Composer should be installed. Run composer install
in the root directory to install the development dependencies.
Settings are included for Visual Studio Code. The PHP
Sniffer extension, if installed, will also make use
of the coding standards defined in .phpcs.xml.
A development server can be configured using npm:
cd /path/to/alp/repository
npm installThis installs
wp-env, which manages a
local Docker-based WordPress instance with ALP preinstalled. Changes made to repository code are
reflected immediately in the running instance.
The environment can be configured using .wp-env.json or by creating a local
.wp-env.override.json file in the root directory, then it can be started with:
npx wp-env startOnce started, the site will be available at http://localhost:8888/. The default credentials are
admin and password.
The environment can be stopped with:
npx wp-env stopRefer to the wp-env
documentation for more
information.
Tests can be run with:
npx wp-env run phpunit 'phpunit -c /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/ssl-alp/phpunit.xml'or for testing on a network installation:
npx wp-env run phpunit 'phpunit -c /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/ssl-alp/phpunit-multisite.xml'This plugin was entirely authored by Sean Leavey, but in some cases code was adapted from other GPL licenced plugins. Features from the list of plugins below have inspired features in ALP. Some bug reports and fixes discovered during the making of ALP have also been pushed back to these plugins and WordPress itself: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 20 21
Authors: Mohammad Jangda, Daniel Bachhuber, Automattic, Shepherd Interactive, Mark Jaquith
Link: Co-Authors Plus
Some of the code from this plugin has been adapted into ALP, but the main behaviour has been heavily modified to function using the block editor in WordPress 5.
Authors: Adam Silverstein, Helen Hou-Sandí
Links: WP-Post-Meta-Revisions and Revision Notes
These plugins inspired parts of the design of ALP's edit summaries feature.
Authors: Inpsyde GmbH
Link: Authenticator
The core authentication code of Authenticator has been the basis for ALP's private site feature.
Author: Cristi Burcă
Link: Term Management Tools
Most of the code has been copied with a few minor changes, but the "change taxonomy" function has been removed and the "merge" function user interface has been tweaked.
Author: Hiroshi Urabe
Link: Advanced Posts Blocks
The children posts block was forked and simplified.