How to configure Plone that it plays nicely with Zotero?

Plone and Zotero does not play nicely together out of the box. But you can configure Plone in two simple steps.

What is Zotero?

»Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.« This quote from the homepage of Zotero says it all. Zotero is an extremely useful Firefox add-on to organize your bibliography. It works like the bookmark function in the browser but it additionally extracts metadata from the web source and stores it in a way that you can later use it as a citation database. There are word processor plugins so that you can directly cite in LibreOffice or Word. You can export the Zotero library to BibTeX or sync it with a BibTeX-Database so that you can use Zotero entries in LaTeX or LyX.

When you do research in an online library or on Amazon you can directly import the bibliographic information into Zotero. If you ever submitted a paper you’ll understand why Zotero is my favorite Firefox add-on. Doing research is as easy as clicking on the “Store in Zotero” button right in the address bar of the browser.

Store in Zotero button
Store in Zotero button

Zotero entry of a webpage
Zotero entry of a webpage

After clicking the marked button the webpage in inserted into the Zotero database. The entry looks like shown in the screenshot on the left. As you can see it automatically inserts title, author and type (News Item) of the entry. Zotero further stores the URL and the date when you accessed the page. Zotero even extracts the keywords and stores them as “tags” (see below)

Keywords are stored automatically
Keywords are stored automatically

When you setup a plain Plone site you won’t find the »Store in Zotero« button in the address bar of Firefox. You can add the page to Zotero with another button, but the created entry will miss some information eg. the authors name. So how to configure Plone that it plays nicely with Zotero?

Expose Dublin Core Metadata

As Zotero uses Dublin Core Metadata to extract information you have to switch this feature on. Go to the Site settings (@@site-controlpanel) and tick the box »Expose Dublin Core metadata«. After saving the »Store in Zotero« button will appear in the address bar of Firefox. But you will see that Zotero does not store the name of the author but only the names of the contributors. This is due to a security feature of Plone. By default no information about the creator of a content item is exposed. So…

Allow anyone to view ‘about’ information

…head over to the Security settings (@@security-controlpanel) and tick the box »Allow anyone to view ‘about’ information«. This will expose the name of the creator as a DC.metatag which Zotero can evaluate.

If you just want to have the Dublin Core metadata in the source code but don’t want to show the authors name on the rendered page you can hide the viewlet »plone.belowcontenttitle.documentbyline«.

Thats all!