A few commentators have noted that Omeka’s potential could extend far beyond small history museums, for instance to archaeology and ePortfolios. In fact we have always intended Omeka to be used not only for history museum exhibitions, but also by enthusiast collectors, scholars, libraries, and community groups in many fields—really anyone interested in collecting and displaying digital objects in rich visual and interpretive environments. One good example of Omeka’s flexibility is the community site braddockheritage.org, which was developed in concert with CHNM by local volunteers in the Braddock district of Fairfax County, VA.

As a free and open source product, what we really want for Omeka is for the community of users and developers to take the software in directions we haven’t even thought of. To this end, we encourage you to post your ideas in the forums, and as you use Omeka in new ways, we hope you will post personal accounts, use cases, and links there as well. Ultimately, we hope you will extend the software through new plugins and themes and give those add-ons back to the community by posting them in the soon-to-be-released add-ons directory. Omeka’s modal use case is a small history museum, but braddockheritage.org shows that it can be used for other purposes, even by individual and non-institutional users, to do fantastic things.

The weekend after the untimely passing of Roy, we decided to make a tribute site, where anyone could post stories or images of Roy. Thanks, Roy now has over 90 contributions to the site, contributions to make you smile, laugh, cry, and most of all appreciate the impact Roy had on those who knew him. Roy had long been a strong proponent of our work on Omeka, so it seemed very appropriate to use the system to power a site dedicated to him. I think that Roy would have been pleased with the work that Thanks, Roy represents, and the potential that Omeka has to help people build sites that mean something to them, to create community and to share with others.

We used Release Candidate 3 to power Thanks, Roy, and installed the Contribution plugin to collect stories, images, audio, and video from contributors. To make a new theme for Thanks, Roy I copied one of the pre-packaged theme that ships with Omeka, modified some HTML, adding a few static pages for the “How to Help” page and “Formal Notices” page, and created a new style sheet I edited the plugin form to remove any unnecessary fields (specifically demographic information for the contributor), and styled the form with CSS in the new public theme.

The basic public template used to power Thanks, Roy (without the header image) is packaged with Omeka now as the default theme. Additionally, RC3 includes the Contribution plugin used on Thanks, Roy to gather contributions. We’re in the process of making a directory of plugins on this site, so Omeka users can download and install any that aren’t already pre-packaged with Omeka, and eventually contribute plugins to be listed in the directory.

Omeka development is moving right along. Today, we released Omeka RC3 for a second group of private testers. RC3 features a collecting plug-in that allows you to solicit and display stories and files from web visitors. We updated the existing public site themes to work with these new plug-ins, and added one more design template to the theme library. In the upcoming weeks, the TagSuggest plugin will be available for download separately.

We sent invitations for this test group already, but if you want to get in line for testing RC4 send us a note: omeka.support@gmail.com.