How To: Contribution plugin

The Contribution plugin provides a way to collect stories, images, or other files from the public and manage those contributions in your Omeka archive as items.

Installation

Upload and activate the Contribution plugin (see Installing_a_Plugin).

Watch a screencast tutorial on Using the Contribution Plugin.

Using the Contribution plugin

Once activated, the Contribution plugin will create a tab called "Contributors" in your admin panel, and make a contribution form available to the public at http://example.com/contribute/ where example.com is the location of your omeka installation.

Modifying the Contribution Form

Go to the /plugins/Contribution/theme/contribution folder where you will find the add.php file. This is the contribution form. You may edit it as you wish, but you cannot delete the fields for first name, last name, or email address because those are required when using this plugin.

Linking to the Contribution Form

A link to the public contribution form should be added to the page where you want it appear. Find the appropriate page in the public theme folder on your server. If you want to include that link in the main navigation of the site, for example, you need to open the common/header.php template file, and add the following

'Contribute'=>uri('contribute')

Thus, the entire nav() function should look like this:

<?php echo 
nav(array(
'About' => uri('about'), 
'Browse Items' => uri('items'), 
'Browse Exhibits' => uri('exhibits'), 
'Browse Collections'=>uri('collections'), 
'Contribute' => uri('contribute'))); ?>

If you want to create a link to the contribution form anywhere in your stylesheet, just use the uri() function like so:

<?php echo uri('contribute'); ?>

Alternatively, you can add the following function anywhere in your theme:

<?php echo link_to_contribute('Text of My Link'); ?>

You can change 'Text of My Link' to whatever text you want the link to be.

Consent, Thank You Pages

This plugin comes with some files that you may customize for your project, including a consent form and a thank you page. These files are found inside the plugin directory on your server: plugins/Contribution/theme/contribution/

Please be aware of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and ensure that your web project complies with this law with regard to collecting information from users: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/coppa.shtm