🌐 Harmonizing Connections: Reflections on the Third eLabFTW Community Meeting

In the unfolding narrative of our collective journey, the Third eLabFTW Community Meeting convened on September 17, 2024. This gathering became a symphony of ideas, each note resonating with the theme of integration and collaborative innovation.

🎶 Voices of Integration

Three maestros shared their compositions, illuminating pathways to harmonize eLabFTW with diverse instruments:

1. Alexander Haller (University of Heidelberg): Introduced elAPI, an API client designed to seamlessly bridge eLabFTW with other services, enhancing the fluidity of data interactions (https://github.com/uhd-urz/elAPI)
2. Amir Golparvar (FAIRmat/NOMAD Lab, Humboldt University of Berlin): presented NOMAD integration of .eln import, a free web-service for sharing FAIR data
3. Clemens Mangler (University of Vienna): described how they use eLabFTW, together with QR codes and a Raspberry Pi system, to track samples analyzed using a scanning transmission electron microscope

🌊 Waves of Dialogue

Following the orchestrated presentations, the floor opened to a chorus of community insights, questions, and reflections. This interactive segment underscored the collective commitment to enhancing eLabFTW’s interoperability and user experience.

Introduction

eLabFTW 5.1 has been released! This new version brings many new features, enhancements and a few bugfixes. This blog post highlights some of these changes, but the complete list of changes is available on the release page.

Important change

A breaking change has been introduced in APIv2:

• /team_tags has moved to teams/{id}/tags. If you have scripts using /team_tags, replace it with teams/current/tags to maintain the same behaviour.

Video

A video has been produced, summarizing some of the features:

Have you heard about security.txt?

It’s a proposed standard where websites can point to their security policy, list security contacts, publish their GPG key, and other important information useful for anyone (but mostly security researchers), in a text file placed at a known location (or should I say a “well-known” location 🤪).

• The website: https://securitytxt.org/
• The RFC: RFC9116

You can see ours here: https://www.deltablot.com/.well-known/security.txt

It is similar to robots.txt, humans.txt or ads.txt.

Why we sometimes drop features?

It is quite rare, but sometimes things available in one version of eLabFTW are no longer available in the next version. There could be several reasons for this:

• the feature is no longer open source: this is what happened with the image editing tools of the text editor
• the feature depends on a library or service that is no longer active/maintained
• the feature has been superseded by a superior implementation

What I wish to discuss in this post is the last point: redundancy and its associated maintenance cost. When something is no longer relevant, it’s important to get rid of it or the software becomes an unmaintainable mess!

🌟 Echoes of the Second eLabFTW Community Meeting

In the continuum of our shared journey, the Second eLabFTW Community Meeting emerged as a beacon of collective wisdom and innovation. Held on May 16, 2024, this gathering became a confluence of minds, each contributing to the evolving narrative of our community.

🎤 Voices That Illuminated the Path

Three distinguished speakers graced our virtual stage, each weaving their unique threads into the rich tapestry of eLabFTW’s story:

🌿 The First eLabFTW Community Meeting — A Gathering Etched in Memory

On a quiet day that now lives only in the minds of those who were present, the first eLabFTW Community Meeting unfolded—not as a livestream, not as a downloadable file, but as a fleeting constellation of voices, thoughts, and shared enthusiasm.

There is no recording. No polished replay. No timestamped transcript.

Only laughter woven with curiosity, only questions dancing with ideas, only stories exchanged like the gentle passing of notes between lab benches in the soft morning light.

Introduction

The 5.0.0 release is a major release. You can tell because before it was 4.x.y now it’s 5.x.y. But what does it mean exactly?

The major version number has been bumped because there is a breaking change: complete drop of APIv1.

And that’s it, that is the only big thing that changes, and hopefully it won’t impact many users, as everyone is now using APIv2, right? right?

Introduction

This is a relatively small release, but it contains a major change that impacts many aspects of the application: a rework of the status and categories.

You can see the complete changelog on the release page. This blog post is more about going into details for some of the changes.

How to update (for Sysadmins)

Update like usual: see documentation.

New features

Users features

Rework of Status and Categories

This work was sponsored by Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a big thanks to them!

Introduction

This release contains at least a dozen bugfixes and many new features and improvements, all users should update.

You can see the complete changelog on the release page. This blog post is more about going into details for some of the changes.

How to update (for Sysadmins)

Update like usual: see documentation.

New features

Users features

Improvements for extra fields

Extra fields can now have units (for input of type “number”). You can define a list of possible units and it will look like this:

Introduction

This release comes quickly after 4.6.1, and thus contains only a few bugfixes and new features. Normally the bugfixes would go in 4.6.2 and new features in 4.7.0, but this time it’s a bundle with both.

So what’s new in this version?

You can see the complete changelog on the release page. This blog post is more about going into details for some of the changes.

How to update

Update like usual: see documentation.