It has been only three or four days since we released Omeka to the wild, and already we’re seeing some amazing interest. As of this posting, Omeka 0.9.0 has been downloaded more than 200 times, has been blogged by at least 50 authors, and for a brief time made the del.icio.us homepage “hotlist.” Most exciting to me, however, is the traffic to Omeka’s support forums, which shows that people are really using the software. Most of what we’re seeing are installation difficulties, especially where users are trying to install Omeka on third-party, commercial hosting services like Bluehost and Lunarpages.* The good news is that most of these problems can be worked out relatively easily, and I encourage anyone who is having trouble to take a look at the Getting Started and Troubleshooting forum threads and to post your questions there. Our crack team of developers will be happy to help out. Omeka is still in beta, and as an open source project, we hope everyone will feel comfortable joining the forums, becoming active in the community of users and developers, and just generally helping us make the software better.

* Note: if you don’t already have a hosting account and are thinking of signing up for one to try Omeka, we encourage you to consider Dreamhost, where Omeka has been most thoroughly tested and where we know it works seamlessly.

[Crossposted from Found History]

Omeka was featured in the most-recent episode of THAT Podcast, including interviews with CHNM Managing Director, Tom Scheinfeldt and Director of Public Projects, Sharon Leon. The second half of the episode is a screencast taking you through the process of downloading and installing Omeka. The interviews are great reflective moments on Omeka’s current strengths, and where the project is moving in the future.

THATPodcast is a project of Jeremy Boggs and myself where we feature a topic or piece of software for digital humanists, and split an episode between interviews, and a screencast that teaches subscribers about what we’ve discussed. We plan on featuring Omeka’s extensible architecture in future episodes, so I’d encourage you to subscribe to the video podcast, or the audio version as well.

The Omeka team has worked very hard over the past few months to bring you the public beta, Omeka version 0.9.0, which is now available for everyone to download.

Here’s what you get bundled in your installation:
* Basic themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes
* Exhibit building with 12 basic page layouts
* Tagging for items and exhibits
* RSS feed for new items
* COinS plug-in making all Omeka content readable by Zotero (zotero.org);

Find additional functionality by downloading plug-ins :
* Bilingual plug-in for adding language fields to item metadata
* Contribution plug-in for collecting items from visitors
* Dropbox plug-in for batch adding items
* Geo-location plug-in for displaying items on a map
* Sitenotes plug-in for administrators to leave instructions for users
* Tag Suggest plug-in for suggesting tags based upon their frequency in the item text areas

Thanks to those who helped test Omeka during its private release. Your comments and forum posts were very helpful as we worked through the bugs. While we are releasing Omeka 0.9.0 as a public beta today we still need your help to make it better.

GOmeka!

In preparation of our upcoming public release, we’re inviting beta testers to contribute themes they’ve written to our directory. It will feature themes previously packaged with our release clients, in addition to any created by the community. We’re following the practices of other successful open source projects by making this an open process, which is a great opportunity to dive into the theme-writing process and give back.

How can you get started? The easiest way is to edit the CSS of a simpler theme, like Thanks, Roy or Minimalist. Changes to themes don’t need to be drastic – sometimes the simplest themes are the best ones. You’ve changed just a few colors and the styling? We’d love to see those themes too. Once you’re comfortable using the functions inside those themes, you can build your own. Another choice that’s a step in-between tweaking a pre-existing Omeka theme and building your own, is to hack a layout of an open-source CMS. I chose to take the popular WordPress theme Kubrick and make it Omeka compatible. You can do the same!

All themes are released under GPL, and attributed to you in the directory. This is a great way to get your name out there, and contribute to the community. If you’d like submit a design, contact Omeka Support (omeka.support@gmail.com), or post any questions about theme-writing on the Forums.