Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives | Exhibit Site
Intro
The hardest part of developing any exhibit is creating and preparing the content. Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives was built with an NEH grant and took 2 ½ years to complete—including research, writing, planning, and design.
Take a look at Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives while reading through this breakdown of the site construction.
Site Breakdown
- Theme: “Gulag” theme designed for this site. (See, Themes)
- Plugins: Dropbox (to handle large movie files), Exhibit Builder, Simple Pages
- Major sections and pages:
- Homepage:
- Featured items and exhibit: You can feature any item from the admin/items screen and exhibits through editing the exhibit you would like to feature.
- Navigation titles: to edit the verbiage or to change the links in the main navigation, open and edit the header.php file found in the theme’s common folder: (themename/common/header.php). Find the
<div id=”primary-nav”>and edit the text in between the single hash marks (‘Browse Items’).- Some plugins add links to the main navigation automatically upon installation, such as the Exhibit Builder. To change the wording of “Browse Exhibits”, open the ExhibitBuilder folder in your plugin directory on the server and open the plugin.php file (plugins/ExhibitBuilder/plugin.php). Scroll down to function exhibit_builder_public_main_nav ($navArray){navArray [‘Browse Exhibits’] = uri (‘exhibits’) You can edit the text in between the hash marks to read whatever you would like.
- Archive: this is a standard archive/browse page that is automatically generated by Omeka. By default, the items appear in reverse chronological order starting with the most-recently added.
- Exhibits: Lists exhibits from the /exhibits/browse page. Exhibit summaries are pulled in and displayed here.
- We built each exhibit using the Exhibit Builder and different layouts to display the type of content we had planned for each section and page. We created 10 sections w/4-5 pages each.
- We created a separate page layout for the first page of every section, because each featured a video and called for text available in the “transcript” field.
- To build Russian and English versions, we created 2 identical but separate exhibits: one in each language. Omeka supports non-Roman characters, so on-screen display of Cyrillic characters was not a problem.
- Resources: The Teaching Resources and Bibliography are simple pages that we linked to here.
- Episodes in Gulag History is a WordPress blog that was installed in a separate folder called /podcast.
- Homepage:
