Omeka is now supported by JumpBox, a service that simplifies the process of installing open source software. JumpBox gives you the option to run a virtual machine locally on your Windows/Mac/Linux personal computer, or to purchase website hosting that includes Omeka already installed.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Omeka with Jumpbox, check out this informative screencast created by Sean Tierney of Jumpbox, or go ahead and download the Omeka 1.1 Jumpbox.

We’re excited to be working with Jumpbox, which is part of our larger effort to provide one-click installs of Omeka. We encourage you to contact your web host and ask for Omeka support.

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.

The Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri School of Journalism launched the Pictures of the Year International Archive over the weekend using Omeka. The Archive, which contains over 40,000 historic photographs arranged by collection, chronicles more than fifty years of journalism history, including striking images of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. In future the Archive will feature thematic, museum-style exhibits using Omeka’s exhibit builder functionality. The POYi Archive features an elegant original Omeka theme and offers a good example of the kind of customizations and display choices Omeka enables. It also provides another example of the range of collections-based research being published with Omeka. Check it out!

[Crossposted from Found History]

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.

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.