Argh, Manakin, don’t do that!
Manakin has one seriously broken behavior that I can’t figure out how to fix, but there’s a workaround that I recommend to everyone.
If you try to click on a link to a page that needs you to be logged in, Manakin duly asks you to log in and then shoots you over to your page. Fine. If, however, you click a login link from an open page, once you’re logged in, Manakin returns you to the root (main) page of your repository.
Let me count the ways in which this is broken:
- It doesn’t clearly inform you that you’ve logged in properly. When I first ran into this, I wondered if I had!
- If you came from a page with a different theme (visual design) from the main repository page, welcome to total confusion!
- It doesn’t take you to a page that does anything useful with your logged-in status. If you’re coming from an open page, you probably logged in to deposit an item or handle something in your workflow. To do this from the main page, you’re stuck clicking at least once, and probably twice!
- It’s not what the JSP UI does. The JSP UI sensibly sends you to your profile (”My DSpace”) page. Switching to Manakin and not fixing this behavior will confuse every single existing user of your repository. (How did TAMU not find this out on user testing? Didn’t they test? Or do they not have any existing JSP UI users?)
My recommendation is never to link to Manakin’s login page in a theme. Instead, link to Manakin’s profile page (”/profile” instead of “/login”). You can still label it “Log in” if you like. This way, Manakin will say “oops! can’t go to your profile page if you’re not logged in!” It will then log you in and send you to your profile page. Which is correct, not-confusing behavior.
Edited to add: To make this happen by default, go to Navigation.java in the EPerson aspect of Manakin. Find “/login” and change it to “/profile”. Install and rebuild. You’re done.