Just in time for the holiday season, the Omeka team has a special gift for you: a stable version of Omeka 0.10. This version is a recommended upgrade that fixes several bugs since the 0.10beta release, and includes the following changes:

• Updates to the SimplePages plugin to fix a permissions problem with displaying public pages
• Prepackages the HtmlPurifier plugin with Omeka, which adds an extra layer of security to both administrative panel and public-facing forms
• Improvements to styles and markup in the two pre-packaged themes

So go download the 0.10 stable version of Omeka, and let us know what you think in the forums, on the dev list, on Twitter!

As a holiday bonus, we have also upgraded some plugins and released some new ones.  For your treats, check out the plugins page.

Omeka made an eventful showing at RepoCamp last Friday. Sponsored by the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG), RepoCamp was a “free and open event where folks who are interested in managing and creating digital repository software and their contents can gather and share ideas, innovations, trials and tribulations.” Many people expressed interest in Omeka and, more importantly, made suggestions about how it could be made better.

One thing that struck me was CRIG’s tagline: “The coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else.” This humbling yet pragmatic expression befits Omeka’s focus on an open and active community. We readily acknowledge that our users have some of the best ideas about how to use Omeka to its fullest potential. We get great ideas almost every day from our forums and our dev list. And the people at RepoCamp came up with some ingenious ways to harness new standards and technologies to improve and enhance our software. It is unmistakable that the coolest things being done with Omeka is done by you, our users.

Omeka’s How To, or Codex, section offers a wide array of information ranging from step-by-step tutorials for managing your archive to more general instructions on adding and modifying PHP functions in your theme.

One good example of the nuggets nestled in the codex is an instruction on how to add an advanced search to your public site. The advanced search is similar to what is available to you on the /admin/items page, and allows one to search or browse by a specific field which can be quite handy.

Follow the instructions and paste the code into your theme’s item/browse page to give your site’s users an easier way to mine the archive.

After four months in public beta Omeka has grown into a useful and productive tool for many individuals and institutions. But, having workshopped the software with our many stakeholders (including our partners at the Minnesota Historical Society), and having learned many things from our active user base, we are now ready to go to the next level. In the next few months we will be rewriting a good portion of the Omeka code base, to make it faster, more flexible, and easier to develop. Expect big things from us, including:

• A new, more robust and flexible data model
• A new, more usable and attractive exhibit builder
• A new, easier-to-use theme API
• A new, easier-to-use plugin API
• Upgrades to the core software
• Automated data migration

We hope that you stick around to see this new release. In the meantime, feel free to continue developing in the current version of Omeka. We promise the transition will be near seamless.

In step with other open source projects, we recently set up a Google group to act as a developer mailing list.  The Omeka Dev list is open to anyone, but specifically designed to discuss the underlying code of Omeka, plugin development, data and migration, among other things.   Those interested in contributing code patches can do so in this group as well – information about SVN and Trac are posted as a message on the group.  From our end, we’ll use this group as a way to communicate with developers about what we’re working on and changes that are being made.  And don’t forget, for Omeka users who aren’t ready or interested in diving into Omeka’s code, we’d encourage you to continue using the forums which are still “buzzing.” :)