First (okay, second) impressions

This isn’t really a support request; it’s more of a report of my experience getting to know ZotPress (I didn’t want to leave it as a review because I’m still learning). I started with Academic Blogger’s Toolkit way back when. I liked a lot about it, but one problem was the field mismatches between Zotero and getting references into ABT via RIS, and some other bugginess. So I tried ZP, but gave up for reasons I can’t recall. Well, for some years now, ABT has been orphaned, and now it functions no longer. So now I’m a little more persistent in trying to get ZP working.

The first problem I had was adding my Zotero account. I assumed ZP would be linking to my desktop Zotero app, and I saw nothing that challenged that. I suggest that it be made clear that ZP uses the online synced data, not the data in the desktop app. In ZP > Accounts > Add Account, there were two problems. First, it says where to go in the settings, but it doesn’t specify settings of the Zotero website. I know you provide links to the settings, but I assumed it was the desktop app and searched there to no avail. Second, when I finally checked the website, the setting locations didn’t match. The actual location is Settings > Security > Applications.

Then, I had a lot of difficulty wrapping my mind around the shortcodes, and which ones to use. To be fair, once I figured out that, for my purposes, I needed [zotpressInText] with a [zotpressInTextBib]at the end, the Help seemed pretty straightforward. So it’s hard to suggest an improvement there.

Finally, I think some guidance on the sequence of actions in using the ZP interface in a page editing operation would be helpful. By now this probably won’t surprise you, but I found the interface a bit befuddling. It took me a while to figure out how you actually select a reference.