We are excited to announce two new Omeka plugins that were developed by the folks at the University of Virginia’s Scholar’s Lab. Ethan Gruber took the lead and since he knows much more about the EAD Importer and VRA Core plugins than we do, we asked him if we could cross-post his Scholar’s Lab blog entry, Expanding the Capabilities of Omeka here. Ethan is a web application developer for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the University of Virginia Library.

Note: Plugins available for check out through SVN for now, but will be available to download as zip files through the plugin directory in the near future.

Because I have a keen interest in the description of cultural heritage artifacts and in doing interesting things with metadata, in recent months I have developed a handful of Omeka plugins to meet these interests. My first foray into plugin development for the application was with the EAD Importer. The EAD Importer, as the name suggests, extracts item-level metadata (along with a bit of collection-level metadata, like rights) from Encoded Archival Description finding aids and generates a CSV file which can be imported through the CSV Import plugin developed by the Omeka crew. The plugin would be useful to archivists who would like to use Omeka to build online exhibits of their collections. I took this framework a step further to create a plugin that is capable of importing any flat XML into Omeka by transforming that file into a CSV file.

Most recently, I have turned my attention to expanding the descriptive abilities of Omeka into the realm of collections of artwork. Omeka items are described with Dublin Core, which is capable of describing anything, though not particularly well. I developed VraCoreElementSet, which incorporates VRA Core fields into the Edit Item form. VRA Core is a much more semantically appropriate schema for describing art and artifacts. Since it was conceived as an XML standard (not strictly a flat list of fields), some elements have hierarchical sub-componenets. For example, a work may have several agents involved in its production, and each agent has a name as well as a role, culture, birth date, and, as the case may be, a death date. The VraCoreElementSet plugin creates a table for agents so that a user may enter this data separately. Then in the Edit Item form, the user may select VRA Core agents from a drop down menu restricted by the records in the agents table. Records may also be exported to schema-compliant VRA Core XML. There is still some work remaining on this plugin, but it is well on its way toward completion.

Now that the Scholars’ Lab has contributed EAD Importer and VRA Core Element Set plugins, Omeka may attract new institutional users from the library, archive, and museum fields, who may have otherwise settled for proprietary applications to disseminate their digital collections.

We are trying something new this year and launching our first Omeka Plugin Rush. The Omeka Team needs help building plugins, so we decided to turn to our Omeka developer community for some assistance. Will you help us?

What, you might ask, will developers get in return for this work? In addition to the public praise the Omeka team will heap upon you, we will send along a mystery box of SWAG and a cash prize–each plugin pays a different amount depending on difficulty.

While we appreciate your ideas for plugins, we have a few in mind for the Rush. By May 1, 2010, we want working code for the following plugins:

• Flickr importer–grab images, metadata and imports into Omeka.($250)
• User tagging–allow anonymous users to tag items on public site. ($100)
• Autocomplete for metadata–make data entry easier by suggesting previously used terms for each field with a dropdown box.($100)
• Timeline Widget– allow users to add a SIMILE Timeline widget to their theme.($100)
• Feed Importer ($250)–import data from Atom and RSS feeds.
• Flash Wrapper ($100)–displays movie files with an embedded flash video player widget.

If you are interested in “rushing”, please do the following:

• Check out the specs for each plugin.
• Email our dev team(will at omeka dot org) stating which plugin you want to build and include a quick proposal or outline for approaching the code (Only one plugin per person or team).
• Wait for dev team response. They will review proposals, make suggestions, and contact applicants to assign plugins. Once a plugin is assigned, it will come off of the list.

This Plugin Rush will be managed and updated on the dev list, and then we will announce the developers on the blog once the code is available for download in the Omeka plugin directory.

This is a great opportunity to test your skills, help an open-source community, and get a box of random things from the Omeka Team.

Tell your friends!

If you have been waiting to try Omeka, today’s the day.

Today the Omeka team at CHNM and our growing developer community are celebrating the release of Omeka 1.0. This production-grade release marks the completion of Omeka’s basic requirement set. Maintaining our commitment to serious web publishing for scholarship and cultural heritage, Omeka 1.0 incorporates unqualified Dublin Core metadata for organizing and displaying collections; support for extensible element sets; robust, flexible theme and plugin APIs; and plugins for Zotero compatibility, static page creation, and building sophisticated online exhibitions.

New with Omeka 1.0 is an improved exhibit builder; support for associating and displaying file-type icons; JPEG2000 support; and new import plugins, including a CSV importer and an OAI-PMH harvester. Moreover, with the addition of an OAI-PMH repository plugin, Omeka can now serve as an OAI provider. Best of all, Omeka 1.0 maintains its five minute setup, its intuitive user interface, its easy design theme switching, its many site enhancing plugins, and its free support resources.

This is a major milestone for Omeka, and we are very grateful to the many supporters, evangelists, open source developers, forums contributors, funding agencies, and friends who made it possible. Over the next several months, the Omeka team will continue to release bug fixes, minor improvements, and additional plugins and themes. But most of our energy will be devoted to making Omeka available as a hosted web service, allowing Omeka users the choice of downloading and hosting their own installation of Omeka, or signing up for a hosted account at Omeka.net. Stay tuned.

Download Omeka 1.0 today.

Jeremy has been building websites and multimedia for the better part of this century, and joins us as a guest blogger to announce the release of his Omeka plugin: Sort Browse Results. Spending several years at an institute of technology in New Zealand, Jeremy’s emphasis is on usability and accessibility and he has a keen interest in open source software. He also enjoys long walks on the beach and beer.

Being an interface developer, it helps to have an online personal portfolio of web sites to show off to prospective employers and the like. But just like the worst clients I complain about, I am constantly changing the design and requirements causing me to rebuild the site from the ground up, again and again. With a static site this was becoming quite tedious. I decided I needed an archiving system where I could keep and describe various assets such as web sites and interactive resources, a system that would allow me to change the interface without effecting my content. My search led me to Omeka.

With its semantic archiving and extensible MVC architecture, Omeka was perfect for the task. I wanted to create an interface where the user could manipulate the view to see the items they are most interested in. Omeka’s tagging and search features form the foundation to achieving this. I also wanted to give the user the ability to sort the items, for example based on the title, the date created or the item type. As this was not part of the Omeka core, I set about creating a plugin.

This screenshot is of items listed in Jeremy's Omeka archive. By clicking on 'title,' 'type,' or 'date,' you can sort items on the browse page of your archive.

The outcome was the Sort Browse Results plugin. Download the zip file. This is a simple plugin that allows items on the items/browse page to be sorted by any element in the site. Once installed and activated, see “Getting Started with Plugins” for more info, theme developers need to add just a few extra simple PHP calls in the /items/browse.php page and it’s all done. It’s flexible enough to be used how you wish. A drop-down list for example or a table with clickable headings. CSS class selectors are returned to allow unique styling of the selected element. For example you could use CSS background property to display an arrow next to the element the results are sorted by.

The Omeka development team is scheduling weekly developer chats on IRC. Our first chat was this afternoon at 2:30EST, and we had a good showing of both the core dev team along with users and coders from a variety of institutions including libraries and universities. For Q&A about hacking themes and plugins, and to talk more generally about developing with Omeka, join us on IRC at irc.freenode.net #omeka

Our next scheduled chat will be at 2:30EST on Friday, January 16th. I’ll talk to you then!