I’m pleased to announce the New York Public Library has released its first online exhibition using the Omeka platform. Eminent Domain is a photographic installation chronicling the changing nature of urban space in New York City today. NYPL Labs is planning a series of projects using Omeka and its developers have become very active on the Omeka forums and dev list. I think I can speak for the entire team and say we’re very grateful for their help and impressed with the results of their first foray with Omeka.

[Crossposted from Found History]

Some of you out there might want to start working up theme of your own. While you could just start with a black css file, or try hacking up one of the pre-packaged theme, we thought it might be easier if you there was a template to work off of. So we present a new theme, From Scratch.

This isn’t a theme in any normal sense because it is completely styleless. Once you install it, your Omeka installation will become the ugliest of blue links on a white background. But what Jeremy and I worked to do was include every default element, class, and id that is common across Omeka themes. So for those of you interested in building something from the ground up, this theme should give you a nice starting point. And if you stick to the general plan it outlines, it should allow your theme to be portable across multiple Omeka installations if you choose to share it.

So go grab From Scratch over in the theme directory, and have at it!

What happens when you fill a room with 15 Omeka users? Last weekend we found out at THATCamp, a barcamp-style unconference bringing together digital humanities theorists and practitioners from all around the country. Sessions ranged from discussions of teaching, to visualization tools, to hacking code. At the Omeka session, Jeremy and I led a fielded questions ranging from how to edit a theme, to feature requests, and discussed how Omeka works today. Thanks to all who could make it — we had a great hour-long discussion.

Today’s tutorial demonstrates how to add an item to an Omeka installation. Next week we will tackle editing and deleting.

Happy Friday!

Today we are releasing our first video tutorial to demonstrate Omeka’s basic functions. We plan to release them on Fridays, since we know many of you work on Omeka projects over the weekend.

In our efforts to make using Omeka as easy as possible we now offer tutorials in print, so to speak, and in video, and provide everyone a place to play in the Sandbox.

This week’s screencast demonstrates how to install Omeka on your server, which was originally recorded for THATPodcast.

The list of available design themes increased by one today and “Dark” is now available for downloading. “Dark” is an abstracted and modified version of the forthcoming Art@Mason website, built with Omeka, that is particularly good for displaying images.

As the summer progresses, the theme directory will continue to grow. We also encourage anyone developing their own Omeka theme to share it with the community.

Are you interested in playing with Omeka before downloading and installing your own copy? If you are, please visit our new Sandbox. Here you may test the functionality of an Omeka installation by adding and editing items, creating collections, building exhibits, and changing settings. Unlike a copy that you download, you cannot upload files, install plugins, or change the CSS. But, we think the Sandbox still gives you a good idea of what Omeka can do.

To access the administrative panel, go to:http://omeka.org/sandbox/demo/admin. At the login screen, enter “demo” as the username and “sandbox” as the password (do not include quotation marks).

Play all that you want, because we will reload the original database and its settings at the end of the day.

In step with other open source projects, we recently set up a Google group to act as a developer mailing list.  The Omeka Dev list is open to anyone, but specifically designed to discuss the underlying code of Omeka, plugin development, data and migration, among other things.   Those interested in contributing code patches can do so in this group as well – information about SVN and Trac are posted as a message on the group.  From our end, we’ll use this group as a way to communicate with developers about what we’re working on and changes that are being made.  And don’t forget, for Omeka users who aren’t ready or interested in diving into Omeka’s code, we’d encourage you to continue using the forums which are still “buzzing.”

It’s April, so it’s time to think about exhibits. You might ask why in April? Even though the official equinox is in March, April feels more Spring-like bringing with it metaphors of renewal, growth, and productivity. Perhaps we are getting too deep, but we are curious to know if you have built any exhibits since the release of Omeka 0.9.0.

To share your work, we created a special section in the forums called “Use Cases” where you may show off your exhibits and/or sites–finished or in-progress works. You can even comment on the exhibit development process or lessons you learned along the way.

We are tweaking the exhibit builder feature for future releases and are very interested in hearing about your experiences.

Please take a minute to post some of your projects or thoughts in the Use Cases section of the forum.

Happy Spring!

Omeka 0.9.1 is our first release since the initial public launch on February 20, 2008. It fixes 20+ bugs, and we highly recommend that all users upgrade their existing Omeka installations. The API hasn’t changed since the 0.9.0 release, so existing themes and plugins should continue to work after the upgrade.

If you have found a bug in Omeka, we would love to hear about it on the forums. We ask only that you first make sure that you have upgraded to the latest available release of Omeka. Also, bugs are fixed on a daily basis, and developers who would like to keep up with the latest changes are invited to check out a copy of the stable-0.9 branch via SVN.

Enjoy!