Following all the exciting work and news coming from Day of DH, the Omeka team wants to keep that spirit going by giving a shout-out to all of the people using — and improving — Omeka by sharing the wonderful materials they have.

We’d like to thank all the people who have contributed to Omeka by submitting questions in our forums. These are great people building great new sites, and doing DH by building, tweaking, asking questions, and making new ways to publish their work and holdings.

In the last year or so, we’ve also seen a noticeable increase in the number of people who suggest ideas, insights, and sometimes even code. Sometime this comes via our forums, sometimes via the dev list, sometimes via GitHub. From whatever path it comes, it is always welcome and a wonderful part of doing Digital Humanities in a collaborative way.

We want to highlight a few examples of recent contributions from the Omeka community:

• Erin Bell has a project that calls for optimizing how we expose Geolocation data, as part of the ongoing awesomeness of Curatescape (a recent winner of an NEH-ODH startup grant).
• Lincoln Mullen had a great idea to make the workflow for his project easier: an “Add Item” link from the admin bar. He’s added his Add Item Link plugin to the list of plugins for you to enjoy, too.
• Dave Widmer has also been giving us great patches to improve our code.
• Daniel Lind noticed that dates in Omeka were stored in a format that doesn’t work well across locations, and so we made that change and it will be part of our next release.
• Iwe Muiser has submitted several issues and fixes to how Omeka users can interact with the site.
• Katherine Lynch has noticed places where we can improve our ADA compliance, and is submitting helpful patches.

Many individuals are submitting translations since our recent move to internationalization via Transifex, with some notable contributions by:

• Matti Lassila has produced improvements to our localizations, both for core Omeka and for plugins.
• Masaki Hidano  built a Japanese localization for our CSV Import plugin, which will be included in our next release of the plugin.

We appreciate all of the small things that you do, and sometimes those are the most important. All of these individual contributions help extend the reach of Omeka, and more broadly, DH, as wide as possible.

I also want to thank our long-time friends at Scholars’ Lab , creators of the great Neatline suite of plugins.

Last but not least, Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith have been hard at work producing plugins and a theme for the PopUp Archive, an archive for sound files of all kinds. This involves sharing PBCore metadata, audio files, and connecting to the Internet Archive. They’ll be describing their work and their plugins and theme in next week’s post.

I hope that gives just a small taste of the activities surrounding Omeka, and the range of people who are part of the community.

The Omeka team is very happy to announce that a beta release of Omeka 2.0 is ready to download and explore!

Omeka 2.0 beta includes many new features for users and developers alike. For users building collections, we hope that the completely redesigned admin interface will make building collections, creating sites, and using Omeka generally to be much easier. For theme and plugin developers, the substantial changes to the core Omeka code should help make your code faster and easier to write, more consistent, and easier to read.

Who should try Omeka 2.0 beta?

As beta software, it is not ready to be used for public sites, and we anticipate that bugs and quirks will appear as you try it. It is shipping with only one theme, and only the Simple Pages plugin. It is ready, however, for the curious (and adventurous) to try the new features, start preparing to migrate your sites from 1.x to 2.0, and most importantly to provide feedback to us before a stable version is released.

In particular, if any of the following describe you, you might want to try Omeka 2.0 beta:

• You are considering using Omeka for a new project, and want to decide if Omeka 2.0 is right for you;
• You currently have a site using Omeka, and want to start planning for how workflow on the admin side might change in the move to Omeka 2.0;
• You manage an Omeka site that you have customized with your own themes or plugins, and want to start assessing what will be required to upgrade them to work with Omeka 2.0;
• You develop plugins or themes for Omeka, and want to see what’s new and what will be required to upgrade them or start fresh work for Omeka 2.0;
• You have a test installation of Omeka (NOT a site in production!), and want test doing an upgrade to Omeka 2.0.

Remember, Omeka 2.0 beta is not entirely stable, and might still have bugs. Do not try to update any Omeka site to 2.0 if losing any data from it is not okay. If you have a testing site that you would like to try updating, follow these instructions.

Major changes and features of Omeka 2.0 beta

Site Building

A new navigation settings screen lets you customize the site navigation in one place, across all themes:

• Pages can be added or removed, and their link text customized;
• Page order in navigation can be changed via drag-and-drop;
• The homepage can be selected from a drop-down list of available pages;
• Plugins can make pages they manage available to the navigation settings screen.

Metadata and Files

Many new features for managing metadata and files are available:

• Collections now have the full Dublin Core element settings;
• An explanatory comment can be added to all Dublin Core elements;
• Thumbnails are now produced for all file types;
• Plugins and themes have much greater ability to customize how metadata is displayed.

Search

Search functionality has been greatly improved and expanded:

• Search includes boolean, keyword, and exact match options;
• Search encompasses all record types (item, collection, etc), and can be constrained to particular types;
• Plugins can make their content searchable.

Theme and Plugin Development

The tools available for theme and plugin developers have been greatly streamlined and simplified:

• The number of functions to be familiar with has been reduced by approximately 40%;
• Hooks are available to modify nearly all admin pages;
• Using hooks and filters has become much more consistent;
• Omeka’s core code is greatly simplified to make it easier to see and follow patterns;

Documentation

Our documentation for developers has been radically updated and improved. Documentation for Omeka 2.x will no longer be available or maintained in our “codex” wiki. Instead, it has moved to Omeka’s pages in ReadTheDocs. The documentation source files are in ReST format and maintained in github. We hope this will let us be more responsive to problems and suggestions for improving our documentation.

Providing Feedback

For those testing Omeka 2.0 beta and wishing to provide feedback or submit bug reports, we have several channels available. To distinguish questions about the unstable Omeka 2.0 beta from those about the stable Omeka 1.5, we have a new distinct forum for feedback on Omeka 2.0 beta. This is probably most suitable for testers interested in exploring the new admin interface and exploring the visually apparent changes in Omeka 2.0 beta. For theme and plugin developers examining and working directly with the code, questions are always welcome on our dev list, and issue reports — not to mention pull requests — can be made on Omeka’s github pages.

Here at Omeka HQ, we’re in the final stretch of work on the 2.0 version of the software. We expect that the release, which will come toward the end of October, will bring a range of wonderful improvements for both end users and developers. The result will be a version of Omeka that far surpasses the original instance that we first launched in February 2008. But, even at that point, Omeka was a simple open source web publishing platform with big ambitions. During the last four and a half years, supported by the Institute for Museum and Library Services and the Library of Congress, the software has experienced extraordinary growth and refinement. Now we offer and support dozens of plugins and themes, and our work on internationalization has made it possible for users to work in over twenty languages.

While the Omeka team has concentrated on serving the basic needs of libraries, museums, archives and scholars, our users have been producing rich sites that offer access to primary materials and expert knowledge in new and interesting ways. This year alone, we’ve had over 8,000 downloads of the software from our site and that doesn’t account for the installations that are happening using the various one-click options from web hosts or are being cloned from the github repository. One look at the long list of sites in our Sites Using Omeka page will reveal both the flexibility of the platform and the creativity of our users. These sites are just a sample of the work being done with Omeka (and if you have a site that’s not on the list, by all means, add it).

The development community has built amazing extensions of the basic software, taking it beyond the use cases that we originally imagined. Cleveland State University’s Center for Public History and Digital Humanities has released the MobileHistorial/Curatescape system for doing mobile public history work. And the University of Virginia’s Scholars Lab has recently released the Neatline suite of plugins for spatial and temporal work. Omeka also plays nicely with the LOC’s Viewshare visualization tool. These extensions and integrations exemplify the ways that Omeka can serve as a platform for new interpretative work in digital humanities and cultural heritage.

We always meant for Omeka to serve a segment of the cultural heritage community that would not be developing plugins or customizing themes. One of our initial goals was to make it easier for small institutions with few employees or a dedicated group of volunteers and little in the way of technical budget to bring their materials and perspectives to a wider audience through the web. In October 2010, we launched Omeka.net to begin to serve that audience. Today we have over 5,500 users working on roughly 3,800 sites, and we’re experiencing a growth rate of around 120 sites a month.

Together the rich community that has formed around Omeka and the ways that subscribers are using Omeka.net to share their materials more than fulfills our original vision for the software. Now the question is:

What Comes Next?

Moving forward after the release of 2.0, we have three main goals for Omeka:

1. We are committed to making cultural heritage materials and scholarship more discoverable on the open web. The Omeka Commons project will allow us to do that by offering Omeka site administrators a way to share their items at a central point of discovery. The Commons visitors will be able to search for content, share and embed those items, and also follow that content back to the originating site. Soon, we will need testers (those using Omeka 1.5 and higher) to share their materials with the alpha version of the Commons. If you’re interested in participating, drop us an email (commons@omeka.org).
2. We will work to more fully integrate Omeka with existing GLAM and scholarly communications platforms. We firmly believe that content and data silos prevent innovation, so we are developing ways for Omeka to integrate with the places that users already create and share their work, such as YouTube, Vimeo, the Internet Archive, and institutional repositories. Also, we see linked open data as central to the larger goal of integration and we are working on ways to facilitate the linking of Omeka content.
3. Finally, we are well aware that many open source software ventures fail because they fall on the shoulders of a single developer. After nearly five years, Omeka continues to grow and thrive, due in large part to our user and developer community. We remain committed to fostering the vibrant community that has grown up around Omeka, and we will support that community through responsive forums, easy to understand documentation, and ongoing collaboration with developers, designers, and end users. At the same time, Omeka will continue to be an essential part of our own grant-funded work at RRCHNM, assuring the software’s core development and long-term sustainability.

Stay tuned in the coming months for more news on our plans!

Following up on the previous post, here, we want to talk about the broad contours of changes coming in Omeka 2.0 that will be most important for theme and plugin developers.

First and most important, the codebase of Omeka is being extensively cleaned up. This should not only make the code faster and leave a smaller footprint, but also make it easier to find your way around the code to see how things work.

Broadly speaking, unnecessary or redundant functions and methods are being removed. This includes many of the wrapper methods in some of the core code used by plugins. The various functions used to access metadata about collections, items, and other kinds of content are also consolidated from collection(), item(), etc. into one function, metadata(), for all.

Some of these changes will require updating your existing themes and plugins. We are keeping a running list of changes to help you anticipate the updates you will need to make for your plugin and theme customization.
One example is that the directory named “archive” will be called “files” in 2.0. The “files” folder that currently resides in the “archive” directory will be renamed “original.” We will provide specific instructions for renaming those folders to ensure that the transition to 2.0 will go smoothly. .

As always, you can keep up to date with the most recent changes by watching Omeka on GitHub.

Many thanks to our users, theme developers, and plugin developers for your feedback and questions that led to these and many, many other improvements to Omeka in our upcoming release of Omeka 2.0.

The developer team of John Flatness, Jim Safley, and myself have worked very hard over the past months to implement these changes. We hope that you are as excited about these changes as we are, and eagerly anticipate your feedback in mid-October when the release candidate is ready.

The Omeka dev team has been hard at work making many changes and improvements to Omeka in anticipation of our next major release, 2.0. We will make a release candidate available in mid- to late- October for testing.

We want to alert the community of the changes coming, in hopes that it will help users plan their projects and prepare for theme and plugin development work. The most significant changes in 2.0 will effect sites with customized themes and plugins, and we will outline those changes in Part II.

Administration

While much of the work for 2.0 occurred under the hood, web designer Kim Nguyen tackled the challenge of refreshing and improving the look and functionality of the administrative interface. Users will notice that the theme is completely rewritten.

The new Omeka Admin Dashboard is streamlined to improve workflow, management, and overall usability of the administrative side of Omeka. Some notable improvements include:

• Easier access to main admin functions and site settings from the Dashboard.
• Cleaner, more efficient item editing page — no more scrolling to the bottom to click “Submit”!
• Ability to annotate Dublin Core element descriptions, and other element set fields to provide guidance on interpreting fields.
• Option to re-order the admin display of Dublin Core elements, and other element sets, for item metadata entry.
• Easier user management with bulk operations on users.
• Easier customization of site navigation.

Here is an “exclusive” preview of the new Admin Dashboard:

Experienced Omeka content creators may need a day or two to get used to a slightly different layout, but we think that everyone will find the changes improve their experience when working with content in the Admin.

Search

The search facility in Omeka 2.0 is vastly improved. Search functions across all of your Simple Pages and Exhibit content in addition to item metadata, as was previously the case. Moreover, plugins can easily add their own content to the search mechanism. If you will be upgrading from an existing Omeka installation, the search index can be easily updated from the administration pages to make sure users can find what they are looking for.

File Handling

Depending on how your server is configured, Omeka 2.0 will generate jpeg derivatives of many more file types, including PDF files and videos. These thumbnail images will appear in browse and exhibit pages. Additional metadata about files will also be available.

These changes will be most visible to project and content managers. For changes effecting designers and developers, stay tuned for Part II.