I haven’t played with Manakin yet. I don’t know all the ins and outs of making it work, and while I have a fairly good sense of what it will and won’t do (thanks to OR ’07), I can’t swear to the exact boundaries of Manakin problemspace.
However.
If Manakin means that never, ever again do I have to screw around with ItemTag.java just to get rid of the usability-impaired, visual-design-impaired, code-heavy, content-files-at-bottom TABLE that is DSpace’s second-least-lovable UI design feature, it will more than pay back the effort I invest in installing and learning it.
(DSpace’s least-lovable UI design “feature” is ItemListTag.java, also a table with the thoroughly bizarre decision to put dates in the first column—really, people, DSpace dates are mostly useless to begin with!—but at least ItemListTag.java is slightly less cumbersome to mess around with. Still, if Manakin kills it deader than dead too, I will ever so not mourn.)
Being able to build an actual usable page around the metadata (something that looks like a book title page instead of an OPAC result) would be an added plus, but I don’t want to ask for the moon here.
Sorry. Had a bad, bad DSpace day.
