 Hi, everybody. I'm SteelWagstaff. Welcome to the February Pressbooks Monthly Product Update. What I'm going to start the meeting with is showing you several of the things that we have released and that are in production for all of our clients and open source Pressbooks users. The first thing that we want to share is that we have added support to Pressbooks for Google Analytics 4. If you don't know, Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to add tracking information to your websites or to your pages and collect it in the Google Analytics dashboard and visualize who's visiting your site, from where, how often, how long they're staying and those kinds of things. If you run a Pressbooks network, you have a built-in Cocoa Analytics integration which will do all that stuff without tracking the user in the ways that Google does, but you also may want to do it with Google because Google provides additional tools and services. This is an optional third-party integration. For many, many years, Google Analytics used something called UA or Universal Analytics. It was a bit more aggressive in how it set and used cookies. In order to comply with GDPR and some of the increased privacy regulations, Google has announced that they are retiring Universal Analytics on July 1st of this year, and they've released a new product called GA4 or Google Analytics 4. What we've done is we've added support for Google Analytics 4 to Pressbooks. You can use either or both up until July 1st at which point we'll remove support from the old retired product. This is what it looks like. I'm going to share a screen here and show you in Pressbooks how you can configure this. If you're a network manager, you'll come to your administrator network in the settings page and you'll see a tab that says third-party tools. Previously, there was just a single field for Google Analytics. Now there's two fields, one that takes a UA ID and one that takes the new GA4 ID. They're slightly different. You'll know the difference based on the prefix. We've added a little note here that informs people that this particular way of doing Google Analytics will stop working on July 1st. On the back end, what you would have to have done previously, there's a guide that covers all this. So if you want to know how to do this, here is the guide for network managers that we've written. I'm going to drop this link in here if you want to visit it. But we describe how to do this and what happens. So it's pretty simple and pretty straightforward. But if you look here, this is an example of the Google Analytics dashboard that uses Universal Analytics. I haven't customized anything. I haven't built reports. I haven't done anything fancy. There's quite a lot of powerful tools that are outside the scope of what I can train you on and show you. But if you are a Google Analytics user or a power user, this is the kind of dashboard you'd see. And it's sending information based on GA4, the new Google Analytics method. The next thing that I want to talk about is support for a feature that we sometimes call internally, Shapeshifter. And what Shapeshifter is is essentially a tool that allows you to customize the font families that are used in the header text and the body text for any given theme. So I just want to share my screen and I'll kind of demonstrate what I mean by this. In pressbooks for any book that you use, you have the ability to choose a theme. So here are the 21 themes that are available on our hosted networks. You can see, if you look at these screenshots, the major difference for the themes are going to be the typefaces that are used for headers and body text. There are other differences, but that is a big one. So you pick the theme that you like based on the appearance that you like best. In this case, I'm using McLuhan. Previously, McLuhan and Malala had a feature that let you change the typeface for the web book, the PDF and the ebook, and only those two themes had it. But we've added this feature to all of our themes. So I'm going to activate the Andreson theme. And you'll notice that the appearance of my book will then change. So when I visit this book now, it's going to look Andreson-y instead of McLuhan-y. So when I visit this, you'll see that the chapter uses all of the Andreson styles. Well, what's now present is if you go into theme options and go to web options, you'll see two new options for every theme, the header font and the body font. So right now you can see this is my header font, this is my body font. If I want to use the Andreson theme but change the header and body font in the web book only, I can do that here and you'll see a drop down. So for my header font, let's say I want to use Roboto and the body font, I'm going to want to use Spectral for example. I'm going to save those changes here. Now, when I refresh this, you'll notice the header and body font have just changed. I'm now using whatever I chose. I can't remember. Roboto is now being displayed for the header font throughout my book, and Spectral is now my body font. You can customize this separately or the same way in the PDF export options. So here, let's say I want to use Leto for my header and Noto Serif. Let's go with Crimson Text for the body font. And you can also customize it for the ebook. I'm just going to show you the PDF for now. So I'm going to go to my PDF export tool. I'm going to generate a new digital PDF and in a couple of seconds, I'll download this and show you that the PDF is using yet different typefaces or fonts for the header and the body. So this is a feature that's been added to all of our themes. It helps if you like a theme but don't like a particular font or don't like a particular font in a particular format. It just gives you a bit more flexibility and power to customize those things in different contexts without having to pick a whole new theme or get rid of the theme because you just didn't like the typefacing. So here you'll see this, if I go into the chapter, this font and this font are different from this font and this font. You can see there's subtle but slight differences. And I could change them back or put them to the default if I wanted to. This is a book-level setting and it's available now in all of our themes. There's a question I see from Cheryl in the there's a couple of questions that I missed. Ariana, the question is what do you just need to add the new ID for GA4? Yes, exactly. You would just generate whatever the ID is in Google Analytics for GA4 and you would just enter that in that field and GA4 would begin working. You could then remove the UA or leave it in place for as long as you want. You can send both types of analytics to Google and sort it out but it's up to you. You can replace it or duplicate it. Cheryl had a question about readability. So the question was to improve readability with long book titles, is there a way to change the all caps to title case or sentence case? Yes, for sure. So Cheryl, what you're talking about I guess would be is this right here what you're asking about? Exactly. Okay, so let me show you that. That would be customizing the CSS. So here I would use my browser tool to inspect this and I say, okay, this is the H1 class reading header title and there's probably a CSS rule right here that says text transform. If I take this rule out and I were to say text transform, that's the rule that we want there. So this is custom CSS. You could make a feature request and say, hey, do this everywhere because I think it's better for readability or you could do it at the individual book level by coming into your book and saying appearance, custom styles, I come in and set this and I'm going to say text transform none. So I've written new CSS and I'm saying apply this CSS to my book. Hopefully this will do the trick. There we go. So I just changed that for that book. That's how you could do it with custom CSS if unless and until we made that a global change everywhere. I hope that helps with that question, Cheryl. Yes, thanks very much. So if we wanted to apply that to all of the books in our catalog, we would just submit that as a feature request. Yeah, I think probably you could send it to premium support and say, hey, I think all caps titles are hard for legibility and readability. This is accessibility issue. Please make them sentence case or make them write no don't text transform. And then what I would do is it would probably be a pull request that one of our developers open. That's kind of a one line fix. And if we agreed that something we want to implement universally, that would be a very fast and easy thing for us to do. Very cool. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Cheryl. Any other questions that people have about the font selector or the Google analytics I didn't address already? Yeah, I have a question that I think is related to the themes. So I'm wondering, is there a way to easily tell what the differences are across all of the themes, especially those that are not related to the font selection? Because right now, I think most of our faculty or press folks users choose their theme based on the appearance, but now that we can also adjust the font, it would be helpful to know if you really want this feature, you should use this theme or one of these themes, like a comparison chart or something would be helpful. I don't know if that exists already. Ariana, it doesn't exist, and that is a great idea. The honest truth is, I don't even know what all the differences are between our themes. So somebody knew at some point, it was probably Hugh or our past developers, and I will suggest that to our support team and our documentation team. The themes, there's like hundreds and hundreds of possible variables that could be slightly different from theme to theme. And it's a bit overwhelming if we presented all of them, but we could present probably some high level differences, like what's different from theme to theme. We don't do that right now. And that's a great idea. Thank you, Ariana. Okay, cool. Yeah, that would be great. Thank you. Many of you have wanted to know both the impact of your books and providing analytics or stats about page views and downloads is one way to do that. But another way that you can see that a book has reach in the world is by understanding more about how it's been adopted or used by other people. If you publish an opening license book, it means that other people have permission to make a copy and revise that copy and redistribute that copy. We support something in press books called cloning, and previously it was very difficult if you wrote a book to know if your book had been cloned. And if your book had been where it had been cloned and who had cloned it and what they had done with it. And we knew that authors and network managers wanted to know more information about clones that had been made of their book, just to see the life that their book has taken on outside of their network. And so we've added a couple of, a couple of new features that help with this. The first is if you're a network manager, you have a network stats page, and you can see things like users over time, books over time, who's made the most revisions on your network, network storage. And now there's a new thing here that it's a little stat feature here that's called most cloned books. So it's a little graph or little chart and it's going to reload. And it's going to show you since we added this feature at the end of last year, which books on your network have been cloned the most often. We're trying to figure out a way that we could add some retroactive information. We know quite a bit about clones that have happened on networks that we host. We haven't yet added the backfill data, and we may never be able to. But for now, since the end of last year, this will keep track of how many times each of your books have been cloned and which have been cloned the most. So you'll see this graph if you're a network manager. And if you were to click on a particular book, like what is test shapeshifter, you would see each book now has a new page that's called book info that tells you about. Here's the book that I have. Here's when it was created. Here's how many times it has been cloned. So our cloning routine now has a feature where it's like, when you finish, please inform the parent book that you made a clone and where you live. Now there's a couple of things I want to note about this. We only added the ability to reliably track successful clones. It was technically like right before the end of 2023, but we're saying at the beginning of 2023, the list may not include all clones made before that time. And the second piece is this URL here, it was a real URL when the clone was completed. But we have no way of knowing whether that book is still live now or whether that book still serves up this, the press books book. So please exercise some caution or restraint. Like if you choose to visit this book, know that it may not be a book anymore. It may have been deleted. The host of this network could have replaced it with some other resource, but at the best of our knowledge, at the time the clone was made, this was where it lived, and this was when the clone was made. So every book author right now, it lives in under tools in the book dashboard and a page called cloning stats. We may decide to move that somewhere else or rearrange this when we redo the book dashboard, but for now that's where it's at. And every book that has been cloned has one of these pages. For network managers, again, you can see this graph in the most clone books thing, and each of these will link to the particular tell me more about the clones that have been made for a given book. So that's a new feature. Hopefully that will help give you more visibility into the life that your books take on, your open books take on after they leave your network. And I'm open any questions or comments people have about that feature. Is there a way to automate some kind of notification if a clone happens based on that? Yeah, potentially. Yes, Liz, we've thought about this. And I would love to hear from you about the kind of notifications that you would like. We don't want to spam people with a bunch of notifications, but it is possible potentially to notify either a network manager or author or authors when their book has been cloned. Is that something you'd be interested in having? And if so, what kind of notifications would you want? I do get some notifications, and I think that I normally opt in to those. So maybe an opt in type option would be nice. I could tell me that my book has been cloned kind of opt in. Yeah, yep. Or even for network managers too. But I think it would be interesting for authors to be able to have that option too. Yeah, thanks, Liz. Other thoughts from network managers or people? Would you or your authors be interested in notifications? And if so, does opt in sound like the right way to go? Yeah, thanks. I see a thumbs up. This is something we may discuss and we might come back to in the future, but appreciate the input on that. And thanks for asking, Liz. That's an idea we had talked about and we haven't built that feature yet. We probably need to do a bit more research with authors and network managers to find out what they want so that it's useful and not just noise for them. Another change that we made, this is probably of interest mainly for developers or people who are hosting their own press books networks, but we have now ensured that press books and all of the plugins and themes that we maintain are fully compatible with PHP 8.1. It's a newer release of PHP. We are now running PHP 8.1 on all of our production servers hosting press books and things are working smoothly. So if you are an open source user hosting your own press books, you can safely upgrade to PHP 8.1. We'll be working on PHP 8.2 compatibility next. So we're keeping up with WordPress on that and we're keeping up with the latest releases of PHP. Thanks to our developers for lots of hard and visible work, just making sure that we do that. The benefit for you, I guess, is you're running a later version of PHP, which will be more secure. It should be faster and it includes some improved functions and tools that developers like to use and benefit from. All right, so the next thing that I want to show is the coming soon piece. This is something that you got an email from me about probably and that you've seen a blog post or a community forum post about, but we have really over the last several months we've been talking to and doing a lot of research into what do network managers need to administer and run their networks better or more easily. And in the course of those conversations, many of you participated. So if you have, thank you very much. We have redesigned a couple of pieces of the network manager experience. And I want to kind of give you a tour of what you'll see and what's going to happen. And we're pretty close to releasing this. So this is much closer to release than the last time I was just showing you a wire frame. So first I'm going to just start with the login experience. If I'm a network manager and I come to a network, I'm going to log in as a network manager. So I'll click the sign in button. So a network manager logs in. And the first thing that you will see if you are a network manager is a new dashboard. You've seen that we've already built dashboards for users and for books. This is the last piece of that dashboard design. So network managers, this will be your new dashboard. It'll have a little welcome message that will tell you the name of your network. It will tell you very basic information about the number of books, the number of users, and the link where you can go to that stats page that we were just showing them. So if I were to click this link, I would then see the detailed stats about users, books, revisions, storage, and clones. The next thing that you would see would be here are the three basic tasks that you want to do to update your home page. And when I say your home page, what I mean is the page that users see when they first visit your network, this page here, as the network manager, you control what gets displayed on this page and what doesn't. And so the first thing we'll show you is on your dashboard, there'll be a link that says customize the appearance. If you click this link, it takes you to the page where you can customize the appearance of your network. So you'll see a page looks like this. You can change things like the title of this, press books, network, and you'll see it being updated in real time, a test network for publishing books. And you can see I can add a logo. I could change the colors to the branding colors of my institution. All the things that you do to customize the home page of your network, that's going to be available to you directly from your dashboard. We know that's a really common task for new network managers and so put it front and center. The second link is going to allow you to create or edit pages. So if you visit the root network side, you'll notice you could make additional pages like a help page or a contact page and link them in your header and footer. So if you wanted to make a help page or a contact us page, they would look like this. You could go ahead and do so from this menu here. It lets you create or edit pages. So you'll see the about page, the catalog page, the help, and the home page. The third choice is if you are using one of our networks and you have Cocoa Analytics installed, you'll see there'll be some analytics for your home page, which will tell you information about how frequently your home page and your home page pages are visited by the public. So in this case, this is not a network that we use very often, but you'll see over the last month, there have been eight visits to my home page. And here's when people visited them. So that's that first block here, the update home page block. Those are the most common actions you'll do for your home page. And then as a network manager, you'll administer your network. And here's the three most common actions that network managers told us they do. The first thing is that they adjust their network settings. So if you click on this link, this will take you to all the settings that you can control as a network manager. There's the Google Analytics one I was showing you earlier. There's the settings about book and user registration. And there are the settings about your network defaults. It shows you who your network managers are. If you're using the results for LMS plugin, how many people have used it, and then some defaults for uploads and language and page size and book theme. That's all available from the dashboard for network managers. The second and third links here are going to be your book list and your user list. If you run a network before you've seen these before, but your book list is the list of all the books on your network with a whole bunch of filters that help you filter what's on your network by type. And the user list is very similar, but for users. So here's all the users on your network. And you could say, I want to see everybody who has the admin role in at least two books. Okay, just this person and I could download that list as a CSV if I want. Finally, the bottom section here are here are the support resources that matter most to you as a network manager. So we're linking to the network manager guide, which is our written guide documentation. We're linking to the community forum, which is where network managers can go to discuss items of interest with each other or with us. There's a link to the webinar series that we offer. We offer free webinars on a monthly basis. They're sometimes useful for network managers and very often useful for end users. And finally, if you're hosting a network with us, there'll be a link that you can just contact premium support directly. This is where you would go if you get stuck or you have questions you can't answer. So what we've tried to do is say, what is everything that you need to do most? Let's put it in one place in an easy to navigate location. I saw a question from Nick, which says, is there any chance of having user-specific analytics for those working on books instead of the page-by-page editing information? Nick, could you say a bit more about what you mean by that? I'm not sure. I was tracking what you're saying. Sure. The reason I asked is because I have a lot of books that I have my hands in right now and even beyond OpenRN. And the concern is being able to see when a specific user, being able to see more of a comprehensive overview of where all they've been in a book instead of having to crawl through the back end of the book page-by-page down at the bottom to see, oh, they were in here stage January 22nd. Is there any talk about making that more of like, oh, I can just click on this user and see all the different places they've been? Great. I'll show you what we have now, which you may not know about, and then you can tell me what we could do to make this better. So if you look at your user list right here, each user has this little piece underneath them called info. So this is user info. So for example, let's, this is not the greatest network because there's not a lot of people on it, but I'll look at Thomas P.P. When I click the info page, every one of your users will have this block. This tells you who they are, their name, when their account was created, when they logged in last, how many books they belong to, and how many edits they've made. And then this is the only drill down information we have about a book, but it will tell you this user has made this many revisions on this book. And here's the last time they made a revision. Is that close to what you want? And what's missing from this for you? What's missing is being able to see all the individual edits over a period of time. Like which chapters they've edited and when in a given book? When they've been in their EO. Yeah, okay. Which I mean, we can see page by page, it's just a little time consuming. And the reason that comes up is because when there's a team of four or five of us in there, a lot of times we forget where we've been. If you're working as a team, you want to be able to see who's done what when in a given book. Correct. Yeah, that's an interesting problem. We don't have anything good for that right now, but I can see why that would be useful. And what I can do is I can work with you and other people who want this to put this as a feature into our backlog and figure out what we could build to give you that kind of information, but right now there's not much for that. Okay, yeah, I would just be more for like auditing and reporting honestly. Okay, sure. Yeah, for people who need to know that information. Yeah, let's talk you and I and then I'll open this up to other network managers over time and we'll make sure we do some good requirements needs gathering before we start designing a solution for that. But that makes sense. I could see why you want that. I think it'd be useful just to pull the last edit date and time to the top of the page, the top of the edit page. Because some of our interesting chapters are like, you know, you have to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll just to get that that would probably be kind of nice. Let me let me share my screen to make sure I understand what you're saying and that everybody's on the same page with this. So let's say I go to this book. So I'm going to edit a chapter, for example. I can't tell when this book chapter was last revised unless I mean I can look down here for created. But I have to scroll all the way down here before I see the revision block. Yeah. And if it's a really fat, in fact, if you just, yeah, if you just added it like right above or right below the created date, that would probably solve whether like, for example, as an individual user, I bet you I can drag this. Where can I put it? I'm probably going to break something here because I just moved it. Okay, I can move it just below the text block. But yeah, so you're saying displaying it somewhere up here like last revised, last revised would be at a glance very helpful for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because scrolling all the way down to see that is not a great user experience. I have just felt your pain by trying to do it myself. Or maybe even over in the sidebar. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Great suggestion. Thank you. You can jump right to the bottom of the page. But if you have a really long page, you've probably have a lot of edits. And so that list of edits, you have to go up, you know, you have to jump up two or three, four times to get to the sweet spot there. Perfect. Thank you. Very helpful. I'm going to go back to the screen recording part and the screen share and show you a couple of other things that we've worked on besides this dashboard that are coming soon to network manager. So currently, if you're a network manager and you log into the admin dashboard, there's a problem for you in that when you first log in, you're taken to your root site or your homepage dashboard. And you have this big old dashboard of which you only ever use appearance and sometimes pages. And it looks really similar to a book dashboard. And so we've heard from dozens of you, this is really confusing. What dashboard am I actually on? And you then have a network admin dashboard where you do most of the other things. It also looks really similar. And so knowing which dashboard you're on, add to the mix, a book dashboard here, you've got one dashboard, two dashboards, three dashboards, and they look similar and you're not always sure which one to go to. So here are the changes that we've made. As a network manager, you will now have one single menu up here that says administer network and everything you need to do is going to be consolidated into one side nav. Instead of, let's count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, plus however many child items and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 and however many child items, your new dashboard looks like this one item here, one item here, one item here, one item here, one item here, one, two, because there's two different stats pages you could view. And then as many integrations as you have, those are the children menu. So we've radically consolidated this, you can still do everything you need to do to administer your network, but it's in one place and presented, we hope much more clearly. So this is coming soon. That's going to be the side dashboard menu, as well as your top dashboard menu. The other changes we're making are going to be for everyone who uses the top nav. So here's your current top nav, it's real small. And your my books can be a little bit confusing because if you want to create a clone of book, you have to go under my books to do it, and then you see a list of books. Here's what we're doing. My books is just going to have a list of books that you have. Create a book is permanently a button at the top dash, and so is clone a book. Anywhere I go in the admin interface, whether I go to a book dashboard or anywhere else, I will always have the ability to create a book or clone a book. If my network gives me the permission to do that, that will be true for you as network managers, that will be true for your end users. If they want to create a clone a book, they should always be able to do it from the top dash. And the other thing that we've done is for you as a network manager, you might want to add multiple users. Adding users shouldn't be a six-click process. It's now a click this button to add users. We've built a new page that lets you bulk add users to your network. I can add as many emails as I want and multiple lines. And here's what will happen. Here's three people I want to add to my network. And I'll get a little message that tells me what happened when I tried to do this. Okay. These two people were on my network, so I invited them. This person already existed. They've been added. So now I just bulk added users. Network managers will be able to do that anywhere they go on the page by using this add users button. You can ignore, there's these little warning messages. This is a test network. You can ignore those. Those will not appear on your rescue network. Any questions for us about changes that are coming to the side nav for network managers or the top dashboard for all users? Is there an approximate timeframe on when particularly the clone book create a new book will show up for end users? We're putting together some workshops right now for our faculty and I'd like to know kind of when that switch will happen. Yeah. Great. So right now it's still available. The options are available, but they're hidden under that my books menu. Right. It'll be part of our next release. And my expectation is that we will probably release this to production either the last week of February. So next week or early March. Okay. We don't have a fixed date yet, but it's coming very soon within. That works. That works as far as our timeline. So the change will be implemented before we start. So it's good. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for checking, Jamie. And that's kind of why we wanted to preview it because I know this if you were to do a training and suddenly your interface was different, that can be disruptive. The last thing that I want to share and then talk about with you as a roundtable topic is the question of discoverability. So framing this, what we want to do is we want to help authors and network managers make sure that the books that they've published can be found by people who want to read them, download them, buy them, clone them, however they want to be found. And so historically, what we focused on is making sure there's a metadata in the books is good and shared with things like search engines. We've also built tools like the press books directory or the better network catalog so that you have a place that you can showcase and find your books. But we realized that people look for books, lots of other places besides the press books directory and besides Google and Bing and other search engines. And so we want to work on the problem of discoverability. And one of the first things that we decided to do is EBSCOS has a product called Faculty Select. The product manager there is a former network manager at Press Books and said, hey, I know about the Press Books directory. You have thousands of books that people published. They're great. We would like to get them into our free Faculty Select product. And so we have an agreement with EBSCOS hosts that we are providing them with the open metadata from all of the openly licensed books in Press Books directory. They are going to be ingesting those into their Faculty Select product. It's a discovery tool to help people that are thinking about adopting open textbooks. This is going to be announced, I think, later this month or early in March. I think we're pretty excited about trying this out and piloting this with Faculty Select. And we're also trying to figure out other places and other ways that you would like us to focus on in helping to solve this problem of discoverability. And so some possibilities that we've thought about, I guess, are better mark records for library catalogs, things like OAIPNH, which is an interoperable metadata standard that a lot of catalogs use, or a feed that includes information about EPUB downloads that could be consumed by free lending libraries and other kinds of things. My question for those of you who are network managers are, what are your discoverability goals? What are the things that you think we ought to prioritize on? And what matters to you? And I can pause the recording so that you can speak freely if you want. Thanks again, everybody, for coming and for catching up with Press Books updates. Thanks for attending this month, and we'll see you next month.