We’re happy to announce a maintenance release of Omeka, bringing us to version 2.0.3! This maintenance release fixes some bugs to the HTML editor, error reporting, display, and more. Please read the release notes for details.

There are also improvements to all of the bundled themes (Thanks, Roy; Seasons; Berlin). This release also includes the new “Night” stylesheet in the bundled Seasons theme.

We also have one new plugin, Derivative Images, and two updated ones, Commenting and Geolocation.

Derivative Images is an evolved version of the Image Files plugin for Omeka 2.x. Image Files for Omeka 1.x let you resize your thumbnail and other derivatives. With Omeka 2.0 now producing derivatives of many more file types (sound, document, etc.), this completely reworked plugin allows you to selectively produce new derivatives for any file type. This is especially useful for sites that have upgraded to Omeka 2.x from Omeka 1.x and want to take advantage of the new derivative images.

Geolocation includes a small but important improvement. Matti Lassila added an option for searching with a radius in kilometres instead of miles.

Commenting has been upgraded with new features and security, such as the ability to allow site visitors to flag comments as inappropriate.

Speaking of commenting, for our friends using Omeka.net as their hosted Omeka solution, Commenting is now included in Silver plans and above. (Note that Omeka.net, and the Commenting plugin, have not yet been upgraded to Omeka 2.0, though we are working on that, too.)

The Omeka team is happy to announce new and updated plugins and themes.

Geolocation is now updated to be compatible with the Omeka 2.x series. Geolocation allows you to pin a location for your items onto a map, and display a map showing all the geolocated items.

We are also happy to release a brand new plugin for Omeka, Search By Metadata. It allows site builders to build navigation between items by turning any field into an automatic search for other items with the same data. If you want to guide your visitors from one item with the subject “Digital Humanities” to a list of other items with that subject, this plugin lets you do that quickly and easy through the admin interface.

Finally, we are releasing an update to the Seasons theme. In the spirit of breaking expectations, there is now a fifth season — “night”. The night stylesheet is a dark style, suitable for displays of artwork.

More is on the way, and in the next two weeks we’ll spend less time talking about what we have produced and more about what our community has been up to. There are great new plugins and themes coming Omeka designers and developers out in the world. So, for a special Day of DH post we’ll draw attention to them and their work, and show our appreciation.

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.

Today, we offer a Spring bug fix release, version 1.5.1, which contains a few backend fixes (see release notes) and additional base languages contributed and translated by the Omeka community. See the current list of translations available, and if you don’t see your preferred language, sign up to start your own translation.

Coinciding with this bug-fix release, we are also making two new plugins available and updating a third. Each of these plugins work with Omeka version 1.5 and above.

1. Library of Congress Suggest: Building on work done for the Library of Congress Subject Headings plugin, LC Suggest extends the functionality by adding an auto-complete feature to almost any metadata field in your Omeka site by pulling results from the Library of Congress’s full list of authorities and controlled vocabularies. The plugin is configurable by end users, within the admin interface.
2. Item Order: Responding to user feedback, the Item Order plugin allows users to re-order items for public display on the public Collection browse pages from within the admin interface.
3. Scripto: Updating this plugin fixes a small bug in the plugin libraries. Scripto gives an Omeka site crowdsourcing functionality for any item type. If you are interested in testing Scripto with Omeka, try it out in our Sandbox site.

We are happy to see the Omeka user base continue to grow. We have noticed many more members of the community are helping on the forums and teaching Omeka workshops–one person even offered to host one in her own living room! Thank you for spreading the Omeka love and for contributing back to the project.

Happy Spring!

Since 2009, any Omeka website may make their data available by activating the OAI-PMH Repository plugin and may harvest OAI-PMH data sets with the OAI-PMH Harvester. Now, the OAI-PMH Harvester plugin is available with every Omeka.net site. Are you sharing and harvesting?

Some online repositories expose their metadata through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), an “initiative to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.”

We here at CHNM developed Omeka with interoperability as a key feature from its early stages. We also envisioned that Omeka would facilitate the sharing of digital collections and archives across institutions and individuals. For example, a regional cultural consortium could highlight collections in an Omeka site featuring digital objects from local museums, galleries, and libraries focused on on thematic topics or for the purpose of celebrating a local anniversary or special event.

Never tried this sharing thing? All you need to do is to install the OAI-PMH Repository to expose data, and tell someone–either through our list of harvestable Omeka sites, or with the OAI community. The plugin reads an Omeka collection as a set. If you have no collections, your entire archive may be exposed.

If you’re interested in testing out the OAI-PMH Harvester plugin, try these examples of harvestable sets. (Don’t worry, you may delete the harvest when you’re done testing.):

• Library of Congress OAI-PMH sets (no files, but contain many sets of item metadata): http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0
• Bibliothèque Numérique – Université Rennes 2, University Libraryhttp://bibnum.univ-rennes2.fr/oai-pmh-repository/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
• Bracero History Archive: http://braceroarchive.org/oai-pmh-repository/request

The page of harvestable sets is small and we would like to see it grow. Sign into the wiki, add your base URL, and let the Omeka community know if you are exposing your data. Thanks for sharing!