State of Dev, February 2025

In terms of development happening around museum-digital, February 2025 was a rather calm month. While more happened in the “machine room”, immediately visible changes are mostly restricted to bugfixes. And a whole new tool.

Here, as so often, in a list format:

Frontend

• Bugfix: The detailed description was not reflected in the object API even if set to be so via musdb
• Translation: The frontend is now available in Kannada

musdb

• Bugfix: Fixed error in setting up new two factor authentication via TOTP (app-based 2fa)
• Bugfix: Symbols for image rotation switched (counter-clockwise symbol rotated clockwise and vice-versa)
• Feature: If the generation of a PDF catalogue is triggered via the sidebar of series editing pages, the objects will follow their order within the object group

Importer

• If no explicit name/title for a resource (audio, video, PDF, 3D, externally hosted image) was supplied, there was no fallback. Now, the importer follows the same logic as musdb and will fall back to using the linked object’s object name as a resource title if none is supplied.
• The CSVXML parser can now handle multiple objects per XML file.

Auto uploader

The auto uploader is an entirely new tool. When first started, users will be asked to enter the necessary data for running imports. And they are asked for the path to a folder which will subsequently be monitored for automatic uploads.

Whenever the tool then detects suitable contents for an import in the folder, the data will be uploaded and automatically imported. Intermediate steps like the generation of a settings file for the import are covered by the tool.

The tool can thus be useful for museums that regularly import data formed in a consistent format – say, museums using museum-digital for publishing while mainting a separate collection management system. It should be uninteresting to those who spend much effort on preparing imports (e.g. via CSVXML) or who want to migrate to musdb altogether, as it only becomes useful in the case of regular use.

The code is available here, licensed under GPL v3.
See also the more detailed German-language blog post about the auto uploader.