Omeka

Omeka has a document viewer plugin once again! Some of you may remember our iPaper viewer that worked with version 0.9. After a few upgrades in our system and some changes in iPaper’s API, we decided to build a new plugin.

DocsViewer embeds a Google document viewer into item/show pages in both the public and administrative interfaces. The viewer reads PDF documents, PowerPoint presentations, TIFF files, and most Microsoft Word documents.

In addition to DocsViewer, we are also releasing a Page Caching plugin that will improve the load time of an Omeka site by offering different types of caching that is configurable in the plugin settings.

Try these plugins and let us know what you think.

I’m pleased to announce the release of a frequently requested plugin, the Creative Commons Chooser. This plugin was created by a member of our open source community, Mohit Gupta.

Creative Commons Chooser allows site administrators to associate Creative Commons licenses with individual Omeka items by providing a Commons License Chooser in the admin interface. Items in your Omeka archive can be licensed individually, and a single license can be applied as a default setting for new items added to your archive.

Mohit is currently a graduate student at the UC Berkeley School of Information studying the role of information systems in preservation of cultural histories and in evolving interactions with urban spaces. If you’re like Mohit and developing your own plugins or themes, drop us a line on the developer mailing list and we can set you up with access to our addons repository to release the code.

The latest release of the Creative Commons Chooser plugin can be downloaded from our new and improved Add Ons Directory!

We are happy to release ExhibitBuilder plugin version 0.5. Here are the major changes for 0.5:

• Adds pagination for exhibits in the admin.
• Gives Contributor users the ability to add/edit their own Exhibits, adds a function to check user permissions for a specific exhibit.
• Fixes the problem of displaying special characters in exhibit layouts.
• Fixes CSS bug where the breadcrumb would hide parts of the exhibit admin forms.

Developers will be interested in these more technical changes:

• Adds an exhibit builder dropdown navigation helper function called exhibit_builder_select_exhibit.
• Adds an option to the exhibit_builder_page_nav that allows the pages to be displayed by the page title or the page order number.

Please test the plugin and give us feedback on the Omeka Forums or Omeka Developer List.

Today, the Omeka team is releasing the first beta of a new plugin: Reports. Reports lets you create a formatted report from a set of selected Omeka items. You can save information about thousands of items at once, and if you add new items, they’re automatically included in future reports.

The most exciting feature is that Reports let you create a PDF with printable QR Codes for your Omeka items. Mobile phone users can scan the code and will be sent directly to your site where they can learn more about an object on display in an exhibit.

The plugin also supports HTML output, and it can be extended to create a report in almost any format.

Download the 1.0 beta and try it out. Remember, this is a beta release, so it’s not quite ready for use with production sites.

Have a problem to report or a suggestion to make? Please, leave us feedback on the Forums.

We’re pleased to release a new Omeka plugin today: the MediaRSS plugin for the Cooliris image viewer. This plugin makes your archive browsable using the popular Firefox extension that “transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D experience for enjoying online media.” The ability to zoom into images and browse a visual wall creates a new way of navigating through your Omeka site.

Go ahead and download version 1.0, and follow the instructions on how to install the plugin in your theme.