The TAPAS technical development team at Northeastern University has been working for several years on a major overhaul of TAPAS, with an emphasis on security, accessibility, and improving the user experience. The bad news is that we need to remove several technical dependencies, and in particular we have a hard deadline for upgrading the site’s current platform, which is reaching its end of life by January 2025. It will not be possible to complete the overhaul by then, so TAPAS will be offline for a period of time in early 2025. We will work hard to ensure that this downtime is as brief as possible, but it will be a few months. The good news is that once we're done, the relaunched TAPAS will include all of the features you have come to love, with significant improvements.
If you have plans to teach with TAPAS in 2025, please contact us at info@tapasproject.org so that we can keep you posted about the schedule and let you know what will be possible. As we prepare for the relaunch and migration to the new site, we will also be reviewing the existing TAPAS data and removing draft and test materials. We will make contact with their owners before deleting anything; if you have any questions or concerns please email us!
Finally, we will also be planning some beta-testing of the new TAPAS prior to the relaunch; if you’re interested in participating, please reach out to us at info@tapasproject.org! Read on for more detail, and we will post further updates here soon.
Context
TAPAS was originally developed in Drupal and has been maintained in that CMS since TAPAS launched in 2014. As we near the end-of-life for our current version of Drupal, we’ve decided to reimplement TAPAS in Rails. We’ve already encountered some security issues with our version of Drupal and believe that Rails will provide a more secure and stable environment going forward. Rails is also a better match for Northeastern, given their expertise with developing with Rails for various other projects. TAPAS’s current version of Drupal is no longer supported after January 2025, so this change needs to happen soon.
Upcoming improvements
In addition to these important updates to the underlying architecture of TAPAS, we will be making significant improvements to the user interface and to all of the TAPAS workflows, including the creation of user accounts, projects, collections, and items. These improvements respond to many years of user input as well as our own analysis of how users engage with TAPAS. In particular, we are:
- removing unused metadata fields
- streamlining the workflow for creating records and uploading files
- simplifying the site navigation
- removing features that are unused or inessential (such as the user forums, which never received much use).
We are trying to reflect a simpler, more maintainable vision of TAPAS, with the understanding that we can expand in the future based on genuine user needs.
This overhaul will result in major accessibility and security improvements that have been in the works now for several years. The new site will be based on responsive design and provide seamless support for mobile usage, and it will also provide much better accessibility and support for assistive technologies. Equally importantly, moving off Drupal will render TAPAS much less vulnerable to security risks; as part of the site overhaul we will also be implementing some additional security measures in the ways we manage new account creation.
One important outcome of this technical overhaul will be to enable us to expand the set of view packages we offer, so that users have more options for how they can read and visualize TEI data. The new version of TAPAS has a more modular architecture that makes each view package a separate bundle of XSLT, CSS, and JavaScript, with a standardized, explicit structure. Our first new view package, called Hieractivity, offers a structural visualization of TEI data rather than a “reading” view—a fascinatingly different way of seeing TEI data and one that we hope will inspire other possibilities. One benefit of the new architecture is that it will make it easier for TAPAS to work with outside contributors on developing new view packages, so we welcome ideas for different ways to visualize your TEI!
The schedule for completing these updates is still somewhat uncertain, but we are aiming to launch the new version of TAPAS in 2025.