Junior PHP Developer — Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (Contract, Fulltime, Onsite preferred)

The Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media <chnm.gmu.edu> is looking for a junior PHP developer (contract, preferably onsite) to join our innovative and energetic team in working on Omeka <omeka.org>, our FOSS Zend-based content management system and web publishing platform for cultural heritage materials.  You can see the code at <https://github.com/omeka/Omeka>.

Required:

•     Proficiency in PHP (1-2 experience years)
•     Proficiency in Javascript (1-2 years experience)
•     Strong Object-Oriented programming skills
•     Familiarity with the MVC design pattern
•     Familiarity with Zend Framework
•     Excellent communication skills with others at all levels of programming skill
•     Ability to balance competing needs and priorities in designing code
•     Creativity in problem-solving, and openness to experimenting with unfamiliar approaches

Preferred:

•     Experience working on open source software projects
•     Familiarity with HTML5, CSS3, and graphic design principles
•     Experience with Amazon Web Services and other cloud services
•     Experience with github
•     Experience with PHPUnit testing framework
•     Background or experience in the Humanities

With guidance from our Lead Developer and Omeka Dev Team Manager, and in collaboration with other developers and members of CHNM, the new team member will work primarily on various aspects of our Omeka content management system.

Duties:

• Resolve issues in the core Omeka core
• Develop and maintain Omeka plugins and themes
• Build and customize new sites with Omeka
• Help to design and implement future versions of the core Omeka codebase.
• Contribute to other ad-hoc projects within the CHNM ecosystem.

CHNM is the leading producer of open source tools for humanists and of award-winning history content on the Web (for example: Zotero, Omeka, teachinghistory.org and the Bracero History Archive). Each year CHNM’s many project Web sites receive over 16 million visitors, and over a million people rely on its digital tools to teach, learn and conduct research. CHNM is located at George Mason University, which is 15 miles from Washington DC, and is accessible by public transportation.

Please send a resume and cover letter to jobs@chnm.gmu.edu. We will begin reviewing materials immediately.

There are also improvements to all of the bundled themes (Thanks, Roy; Seasons; Berlin). This release also includes the new “Night” stylesheet in the bundled Seasons theme.

We also have one new plugin, Derivative Images, and two updated ones, Commenting and Geolocation.

Derivative Images is an evolved version of the Image Files plugin for Omeka 2.x. Image Files for Omeka 1.x let you resize your thumbnail and other derivatives. With Omeka 2.0 now producing derivatives of many more file types (sound, document, etc.), this completely reworked plugin allows you to selectively produce new derivatives for any file type. This is especially useful for sites that have upgraded to Omeka 2.x from Omeka 1.x and want to take advantage of the new derivative images.

Geolocation includes a small but important improvement. Matti Lassila added an option for searching with a radius in kilometres instead of miles.

Commenting has been upgraded with new features and security, such as the ability to allow site visitors to flag comments as inappropriate.

Speaking of commenting, for our friends using Omeka.net as their hosted Omeka solution, Commenting is now included in Silver plans and above. (Note that Omeka.net, and the Commenting plugin, have not yet been upgraded to Omeka 2.0, though we are working on that, too.)

We’d like to thank all the people who have contributed to Omeka by submitting questions in our forums. These are great people building great new sites, and doing DH by building, tweaking, asking questions, and making new ways to publish their work and holdings.

In the last year or so, we’ve also seen a noticeable increase in the number of people who suggest ideas, insights, and sometimes even code. Sometime this comes via our forums, sometimes via the dev list, sometimes via GitHub. From whatever path it comes, it is always welcome and a wonderful part of doing Digital Humanities in a collaborative way.

We want to highlight a few examples of recent contributions from the Omeka community:

• Erin Bell has a project that calls for optimizing how we expose Geolocation data, as part of the ongoing awesomeness of Curatescape (a recent winner of an NEH-ODH startup grant).
• Lincoln Mullen had a great idea to make the workflow for his project easier: an “Add Item” link from the admin bar. He’s added his Add Item Link plugin to the list of plugins for you to enjoy, too.
• Dave Widmer has also been giving us great patches to improve our code.
• Daniel Lind noticed that dates in Omeka were stored in a format that doesn’t work well across locations, and so we made that change and it will be part of our next release.
• Iwe Muiser has submitted several issues and fixes to how Omeka users can interact with the site.
• Katherine Lynch has noticed places where we can improve our ADA compliance, and is submitting helpful patches.

Many individuals are submitting translations since our recent move to internationalization via Transifex, with some notable contributions by:

• Matti Lassila has produced improvements to our localizations, both for core Omeka and for plugins.
• Masaki Hidano  built a Japanese localization for our CSV Import plugin, which will be included in our next release of the plugin.

We appreciate all of the small things that you do, and sometimes those are the most important. All of these individual contributions help extend the reach of Omeka, and more broadly, DH, as wide as possible.

I also want to thank our long-time friends at Scholars’ Lab , creators of the great Neatline suite of plugins.

Last but not least, Anne Wootton and Bailey Smith have been hard at work producing plugins and a theme for the PopUp Archive, an archive for sound files of all kinds. This involves sharing PBCore metadata, audio files, and connecting to the Internet Archive. They’ll be describing their work and their plugins and theme in next week’s post.

I hope that gives just a small taste of the activities surrounding Omeka, and the range of people who are part of the community.

Geolocation is now updated to be compatible with the Omeka 2.x series. Geolocation allows you to pin a location for your items onto a map, and display a map showing all the geolocated items.

We are also happy to release a brand new plugin for Omeka, Search By Metadata. It allows site builders to build navigation between items by turning any field into an automatic search for other items with the same data. If you want to guide your visitors from one item with the subject “Digital Humanities” to a list of other items with that subject, this plugin lets you do that quickly and easy through the admin interface.

Finally, we are releasing an update to the Seasons theme. In the spirit of breaking expectations, there is now a fifth season — “night”. The night stylesheet is a dark style, suitable for displays of artwork.

More is on the way, and in the next two weeks we’ll spend less time talking about what we have produced and more about what our community has been up to. There are great new plugins and themes coming Omeka designers and developers out in the world. So, for a special Day of DH post we’ll draw attention to them and their work, and show our appreciation.

This release includes several bugfixes, including one that is especially important for the Exhibit Builder plugin. Anyone working with exhibits in the Omeka 2.x series is strongly encouraged upgrade to Omeka 2.0.2.

There are also fixes to improve error reporting for more server configurations, fixes to user permissions, and expanded localization.

In addition, there are significant performance improvements, especially when using advanced search for items.

Last, the “Berlin” theme is now available as a responsive theme that comes packaged with Omeka!

Please read the full release notes for more details.

This bug does not affect Exhibit Builder for Omeka version 1.5.3 or below.

The Omeka team apologizes for the inconvenience.

We very much appreciate not only the votes, but more importantly the community of users and developers that has grown up around Omeka, and continues to grow. Your use of Omeka, encouragement, feedback, and forum discussions keep us very motivated to continue bringing you the best Omeka we can!

And so, we’d like the thank everyone who voted for Omeka the best way we know how: with a bugfix release and more updated plugins! Omeka 2.0.1 is ready to download, and fixes some issues with error handling, forms, and other minor issues (thanks to Iwe Muiser and Dave Widmer for reports and fixes) Localization has also been improved (thanks to Matti Lassila).

The Exhibit Builder and COinS plugins also have new versions, packaged with Omeka and available for download separately. These fix a problem with special cases when upgrading Exhibit Builder and memory use in COinS.

Please see the release notes for more details.

What’s more, four more popular plugins have now been upgraded to be compatible with Omeka 2.x.

CSV Import allow site administrators to import items via a comma-separated values file. The upgrade also includes better handling for multiple files, more versatility in how values are separated, and an auto-map feature that improves workflow with a standard set of column headings in your CSV file.

Collection Tree allows site administrators to create nested collections.

Pdf Text is a major rewrite of Pdf Search. It makes your PDF files attached to items searchable via Omeka 2.x’s new and overhauled search mechanism.

Social Bookmarking lets site administrators configure links to a widely expanded number of social media sites so your site visitors can share interesting items with others.

We know many of you are anxious to see some of our other plugins and themes updated to play well with the Omeka 2.x series. Never fear, we’re working on them (again, with some kind and much appreciated contributions from developers who have been giving them a sneak peek via our open repositories on GitHub)! They will be coming along shortly.

We also have a few new plugins that extend Omeka in exciting new directions nearing release. We hope that they will be helpful to site users, administrators, and developers alike. Stay tuned.

And again, thanks for voting!

Well, at least, it’s the moment that we at Omeka HQ have been waiting for, and working towards for many months now.

Omeka 2.0 is now available for download!

The  most important improvement is a completely revamped admin interface, which includes many features to improve workflow and make it easier to build your sites. The search functionality is also dramatically improved, and covers much more of the content in the sites.

The basic package includes three plugins and two themes, and sports a host of good new features. Omeka users will notice improvements right away with an upgrade to 2.0 or the launch a new installation. For example, site administrators have much better tools to build custom site navigation without having to hack around in the code (Check for “Navigation” under the Appearance settings.) Also, you’ll notice major improvements in file handling. Now you can reorder item files, and the system produces derivatives (thumbnails, etc.) from a much wider array of file types, not just image files.

The increased control extends to the updated ExhibitBuilder, as well. Now site users have a great deal more flexibility in designing their exhibit architecture. We have eliminated “Sections” from the exhibit structure, so that exhibit designers can create parent and child pages as their content requires. Furthermore, if a user wants to use an item in an exhibit, she can choose from any of the item’s files.

Omeka designers and developers will also find things to love in the new version. The software includes a more concise function list that dramatically decreases the complexity of creating new themes and plugins. So, we hope to see an increase in contributions of add-ons from the wider Omeka community.

In addition to all of this basic Omeka goodness, we’ve updated many of our most downloaded plugins to go with the new version (Follow the links below). Never fear, we are busy updating and improving the rest and they will be available for Omeka 2.0 soon!

Take things out for a spin and let us know what you think.

Plugins updated for Omeka 2.0

• Docs Viewer
• Dropbox
• Dublin Core Extended
• Library of Congress Suggest
• Simple Contact Form
• Simple Vocab

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well you just might find
You get what you need

With the immortal words of the Rolling Stones, we offer the Omeka 2.0 release candidate. New and improved based on the feedback and testing from the 2.0 Beta, this version of the software makes it possible for Omeka fans to get started on new projects today.

The Omeka Team is putting the finishing touches on updated themes and plugins that usually accompany our full release package. In the meantime, designers, developers, and translators can work with the core software, the default and Seasons themes, and the COinS and SimplePages plugins.

Omeka 2.0 sports a host of shiny new and improved features, including:

• an administrative interface that has been redesigned to improve workflow;
• an improved ability to customize site navigation with drag and drop;
• the opportunity to select a homepage from a range of available pages;
• the addition of Dublin Core Metadata fields to Collections;
• the ability to add comments or instructions to metadata fields for other users;
• the creation of thumbnail images for a fuller range of files;
• and, the availability of a new site-wide search.

Moreover, plugin and theme developers will discover more streamlined code, fewer functions to know (without any loss in capability), an increased number of hooks and filters, and greater overall consistency in how to use them. All of these improvements have been carefully documented by the Omeka Dev team.

Check out the screencast to get an overview of 2.0 goodness, and then go download your copy of the release candidate to get started!

Introduction to Omeka 2.0 from Omeka on Vimeo.

Omeka 2.0 beta includes many new features for users and developers alike. For users building collections, we hope that the completely redesigned admin interface will make building collections, creating sites, and using Omeka generally to be much easier. For theme and plugin developers, the substantial changes to the core Omeka code should help make your code faster and easier to write, more consistent, and easier to read.

Who should try Omeka 2.0 beta?

As beta software, it is not ready to be used for public sites, and we anticipate that bugs and quirks will appear as you try it. It is shipping with only one theme, and only the Simple Pages plugin. It is ready, however, for the curious (and adventurous) to try the new features, start preparing to migrate your sites from 1.x to 2.0, and most importantly to provide feedback to us before a stable version is released.

In particular, if any of the following describe you, you might want to try Omeka 2.0 beta:

• You are considering using Omeka for a new project, and want to decide if Omeka 2.0 is right for you;
• You currently have a site using Omeka, and want to start planning for how workflow on the admin side might change in the move to Omeka 2.0;
• You manage an Omeka site that you have customized with your own themes or plugins, and want to start assessing what will be required to upgrade them to work with Omeka 2.0;
• You develop plugins or themes for Omeka, and want to see what’s new and what will be required to upgrade them or start fresh work for Omeka 2.0;
• You have a test installation of Omeka (NOT a site in production!), and want test doing an upgrade to Omeka 2.0.

Remember, Omeka 2.0 beta is not entirely stable, and might still have bugs. Do not try to update any Omeka site to 2.0 if losing any data from it is not okay. If you have a testing site that you would like to try updating, follow these instructions.

Major changes and features of Omeka 2.0 beta

Site Building

A new navigation settings screen lets you customize the site navigation in one place, across all themes:

• Pages can be added or removed, and their link text customized;
• Page order in navigation can be changed via drag-and-drop;
• The homepage can be selected from a drop-down list of available pages;
• Plugins can make pages they manage available to the navigation settings screen.

Metadata and Files

Many new features for managing metadata and files are available:

• Collections now have the full Dublin Core element settings;
• An explanatory comment can be added to all Dublin Core elements;
• Thumbnails are now produced for all file types;
• Plugins and themes have much greater ability to customize how metadata is displayed.

Search

Search functionality has been greatly improved and expanded:

• Search includes boolean, keyword, and exact match options;
• Search encompasses all record types (item, collection, etc), and can be constrained to particular types;
• Plugins can make their content searchable.

Theme and Plugin Development

The tools available for theme and plugin developers have been greatly streamlined and simplified:

• The number of functions to be familiar with has been reduced by approximately 40%;
• Hooks are available to modify nearly all admin pages;
• Using hooks and filters has become much more consistent;
• Omeka’s core code is greatly simplified to make it easier to see and follow patterns;

Documentation

Our documentation for developers has been radically updated and improved. Documentation for Omeka 2.x will no longer be available or maintained in our “codex” wiki. Instead, it has moved to Omeka’s pages in ReadTheDocs. The documentation source files are in ReST format and maintained in github. We hope this will let us be more responsive to problems and suggestions for improving our documentation.

Providing Feedback

For those testing Omeka 2.0 beta and wishing to provide feedback or submit bug reports, we have several channels available. To distinguish questions about the unstable Omeka 2.0 beta from those about the stable Omeka 1.5, we have a new distinct forum for feedback on Omeka 2.0 beta. This is probably most suitable for testers interested in exploring the new admin interface and exploring the visually apparent changes in Omeka 2.0 beta. For theme and plugin developers examining and working directly with the code, questions are always welcome on our dev list, and issue reports — not to mention pull requests — can be made on Omeka’s github pages.