All of us at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media are very pleased to announce that Omeka 1.5 is now ready for download, and it includes many improvements. Among the most exciting are:

Internationalization: You can now run Omeka in a variety of languages. Omeka 1.5 ships with complete translation files for Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, and Spanish. Partial translation files for Albanian, Macedonian, Malay, Norwegian, Portuguese (Iberian), Spanish (Colombian) are also included. Many thanks to our teams of hard working translators! There are still more languages out there, so if you would like to contribute to Omeka by starting a new translation or by contributing to existing ones, sign up for an account at Transifex and join us! More detailed information about contributing is in this post. To switch your site to using a language other than English, please read this documentation.

File reordering: Upload a file to your item in the wrong order? That’s no longer a worry, as you can now reorder your files.

Media Extension Awareness: If Omeka cannot detect the file type by its MIME information, it will now fall back to using the file’s extension.

In addition to that and many bugfixes, we have added new tools and function for developers. Read the details in the release notes.

Finally, coinciding with this release are several new and/or improved plugins:

ZoteroImport: Import items from your Zotero collections

CollectionTree: Create hierarchical, nested collections

Commenting: Add comments to items, collections, and more

SimpleVocab: Create a simple controlled vocabulary

Scripto: Integrate with Scripto to make document transcription easy

ZoomIt: Display files with the Zoom.it viewer

ImageResize: Resize all your image files at once

These updated plugins require Omeka 1.5, so be sure to upgrade soon to give them a whirl.

Thanks, and happy collecting!

You asked for it early in our development cycle, and now it is finally available: batch editing of items. In the newest point release of Omeka, version 1.4, admin users will now be able to select multiple items and change the item type, add tags, associate items with a collection, make items public or not public, feature or un-feature items, or delete the selected items.

Also, on the admin side, users will find the same item sorting functionality added in 1.3 by column title, plus will see a new toggle to switch from a basic to a detailed view when browsing all items or for viewing the details of one item at a time.

We updated the Zend and jQuery libraries, which will not be evident from logging in to the admin but will be important for developers. Developers may also be interested in new functions available, all of which are listed in the 1.4 Release Notes.

Update and download version 1.4 today. Please let us know how it works and how you like the new functionality.

Happy Summer!

In response to issues reported to us by Omeka users, we are releasing a minor bug-fix release, Omeka 1.3.2, today. To fix some of those problems, we did the following:

• added the plugin_footer() hook to all design themes, which is used by several plugins to display information at the bottom of each page, such as Google Translate.
• edited the custom_show_item_metadata function to correctly display multiple values for Dublin Core metadata fields on item pages.
• repaired the installer so that it will not produce a misleading error message.

Read the release notes for a complete list of updates, or simply download and upgrade to version 1.3.2.

In response to user feedback on the forums, (many thanks to CathyHajo and pcoutas), we created Omeka 1.3.1 as a bug-fix release that correctly migrates and displays collector names for collections. Upgrading to Omeka 1.3 caused collector names to be lost if the collector was associated with an institution.

To fix this problem, users will need to upgrade to 1.3.1, but must do so from a 1.2.x database backup to retain the original collector names. If you do not have a 1.2.x backup, then you must add collectors for each collection by hand. We apologize for this oversight.

This version contains a few other fixes:

• Uses operating system time zone if one is not set in PHP 5.3.
• Correctly generates paths to files when using item_file() helper.
• Fixes installer to prevent installation from breaking when non-alphanumeric characters are used for username.

You can read the release notes, or head over to the download page to get 1.3.1.

The Omeka team is very happy to announce the release of version 1.3. As we mentioned in a previous post, if you’re currently running a version of Omeka older than 1.2, you’ll need to upgrade to 1.2 or 1.2.1 before you can upgrade to 1.3. Everyone will find something they like in 1.3, including upgraded versions of the Exhibit Builder and Simple Pages plugins. Below are some details of these new and updated features.

• In Exhibit Builder 1.0, we’ve improved the interface for selecting items to display on exhibit pages, added a caption field for each item, and provided easier ways to sort sections and pages from the admin panel. Most importantly, Exhibit Builder now uses Omeka’s ‘themes’ directory instead of its own internal ‘exhibit_themes’ directory. This means you can now use any of the public themes in Omeka for your exhibit, and use that theme’s configuration options for each exhibit.
• In SimplePages 1.0, we’ve improved the display of pages in public themes, added nested navigation for child pages, and provided a breadcrumb navigation.
• Exhibit Builder 1.0 and SimplePages 1.0 both require Omeka 1.3, but they already come bundled with Omeka when you download it.
• Sortable items browsing. We knocked off the oldest open ticket in our Trac and added a sorting to the items/browse pages. Simply click on one of the active table headers to sort items. Theme writers can also add this functionality to their own themes with a little bit of work.
• Omeka now uses jQuery by default. All the Omeka admin scripts, and our plugins, use jQuery instead of Prototype. But if you’re using Prototype in your plugins and/or theme, don’t worry. We still bundle Prototype and Scriptaculous, and you can automatically load those libraries by checking a box in your admin’s Settings panel if needed.
• JavaScript and CSS queueing. We’ve provided some methods for plugin and theme developers to add JavaScripts and style sheets to a queue, to help avoid loading the same javascript library more than once.

If you want a complete list of changes, check out the release notes or the changelog for Omeka 1.3, and download it today!