Things are cooking right along here at Omeka, and as usual, we’re looking for more qualified hand to help us build. See the following developer add for details. We begin reviewing applications today, and will do so on a continuing basis.

Junior PHP Developer — Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (Contract, Fulltime, Onsite preferred)

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media <chnm.gmu.edu> is looking for a junior PHP developer (contract, preferably onsite) to join our innovative and energetic team in working on Omeka <omeka.org>, our FOSS Zend-based content management system and web publishing platform for cultural heritage materials.  You can see the code at <https://github.com/omeka/Omeka>.

Required:

•     Proficiency in PHP (1-2 experience years)
•     Proficiency in Javascript (1-2 years experience)
•     Strong Object-Oriented programming skills
•     Familiarity with the MVC design pattern
•     Familiarity with Zend Framework
•     Excellent communication skills with others at all levels of programming skill
•     Ability to balance competing needs and priorities in designing code
•     Creativity in problem-solving, and openness to experimenting with unfamiliar approaches

Preferred:

•     Experience working on open source software projects
•     Familiarity with HTML5, CSS3, and graphic design principles
•     Experience with Amazon Web Services and other cloud services
•     Experience with github
•     Experience with PHPUnit testing framework
•     Background or experience in the Humanities

With guidance from our Lead Developer and Omeka Dev Team Manager, and in collaboration with other developers and members of CHNM, the new team member will work primarily on various aspects of our Omeka content management system.

Duties:

• Resolve issues in the core Omeka core
• Develop and maintain Omeka plugins and themes
• Build and customize new sites with Omeka
• Help to design and implement future versions of the core Omeka codebase.
• Contribute to other ad-hoc projects within the CHNM ecosystem.

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and of award-winning history content on the Web (for example: Zotero, Omeka, teachinghistory.org and the Bracero History Archive). Each year CHNM’s many project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research. CHNM is located at George Mason University, which is 15 miles from Washington DC, and is accessible by public transportation.

Please send a resume and cover letter to jobs@chnm.gmu.edu. We will begin reviewing materials immediately.

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.

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.

Things are cooking right along here at Omeka, and as usual, we’re looking for more qualified hand to help us build. See the following developer add for details. We begin reviewing applications today, and will do so on a continuing basis.

Junior PHP Developer — Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (Contact, Fulltime, Onsite)

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media <chnm.gmu.edu> is looking for a junior PHP developer (contract, preferably onsite) to join our innovative and energetic team in working on Omeka <omeka.org>, our FOSS Zend-based content management system and web publishing platform for cultural heritage materials.  You can see the code at <https://github.com/omeka/Omeka>.

Required:

•     Proficiency in PHP (1-2 experience years)
•     Proficiency in Javascript (1-2 years experience)
•     Strong Object-Oriented programming skills
•     Familiarity with the MVC design pattern
•     Familiarity with Zend Framework
•     Excellent communication skills with others at all levels of programming skill
•     Ability to balance competing needs and priorities in designing code
•     Creativity in problem-solving, and openness to experimenting with unfamiliar approaches

Preferred:

•     Experience working on open source software projects
•     Familiarity with HTML5, CSS3, and graphic design principles
•     Experience with Amazon Web Services and other cloud services
•     Experience with github
•     Experience with PHPUnit testing framework
•     Background or experience in the Humanities

With guidance from our Lead Developer and Omeka Dev Team Manager, and in collaboration with other developers and members of CHNM, the new team member will work primarily on various aspects of our Omeka content management system.

Duties:

• Resolve issues in the core Omeka core
• Develop and maintain Omeka plugins and themes
• Build and customize new sites with Omeka
• Help to design and implement future versions of the core Omeka codebase Contribute to other ad-hoc projects within the CHNM ecosystem.

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and of award-winning history content on the Web (for example: Zotero, Omeka, teachinghistory.org and the Bracero History Archive). Each year CHNM’s many project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research. CHNM is located at George Mason University, which is 15 miles from Washington DC, and is accessible by public transportation.

Please send a resume and cover letter to jobs@chnm.gmu.edu. We will begin reviewing materials immediately.