First, the My Omeka plugin, which allows visitors to your site to annotate items and build their own “posters” to organize and display their work, is now updated to work with Omeka 1.5.

Second, for our theme developers, the From Scratch theme, which is designed to jump-start your theme development by providing a simple style-less basis for your own themes, has been updated to reflect current best practices for theme developers. You will see examples of how to properly use Omeka’s localization system and how to add CSS and javascript to your themes.

Last, we will soon be releasing an updated Simple Pages plugin, which will allow you to choose whether to use the HTML editor for each page. Because it is also one of the plugins that are bundled with core Omeka releases, though, we want to give our teams of translators a chance to add in the new translations. We plan to release the update Simple Pages, with the new translations, on Thursday, May 31, 2012.

Thanks, and happy building!

Coinciding with this bug-fix release, we are also making two new plugins available and updating a third. Each of these plugins work with Omeka version 1.5 and above.

1. Library of Congress Suggest: Building on work done for the Library of Congress Subject Headings plugin, LC Suggest extends the functionality by adding an auto-complete feature to almost any metadata field in your Omeka site by pulling results from the Library of Congress’s full list of authorities and controlled vocabularies. The plugin is configurable by end users, within the admin interface.
2. Item Order: Responding to user feedback, the Item Order plugin allows users to re-order items for public display on the public Collection browse pages from within the admin interface.
3. Scripto: Updating this plugin fixes a small bug in the plugin libraries. Scripto gives an Omeka site crowdsourcing functionality for any item type. If you are interested in testing Scripto with Omeka, try it out in our Sandbox site.

We are happy to see the Omeka user base continue to grow. We have noticed many more members of the community are helping on the forums and teaching Omeka workshops–one person even offered to host one in her own living room! Thank you for spreading the Omeka love and for contributing back to the project.

Happy Spring!

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

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.

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!

We are using the Transifex.net site to manage our translations, which will then be shipped with the next version of Omeka. To work on a translation, just register for a free account there, and go to the Omeka project page. Translation work is organized into teams for each language, so click the teams tab to see what languages have already been started. If someone has already started working on your language, follow that link, and ask to join that team. If not, request to create a new team for your language. Additional information is in the Translate Omeka page in our documentation.

Have some spare time over the holidays? Want to contribute to Omeka while you exercise your language skills? Then sign up for a Transifex.net account and help us bring Omeka to an even wider audience!

As always, you can get Omeka 1.4.2 from the download page.

This release fixes several issues:

• Fixed problems that made some files impossible to delete.
• Files can now be ingested from cloud storage services like Amazon S3.
• Thumbnails are now created correctly for images with multiple frames (like animated gifs).

For a full list of the fixes in Omeka 1.4.2, read the release notes.

You can see the code at https://github.com/omeka/Omeka. Some other CHNM projects are at https://github.com/chnm.

Required

• Proficiency in PHP and Javascript
• 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, from “Hello World!” novice to seasoned guru
• 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 PHPUnit testing framework
• Background or experience in the Humanities

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.

Our preference is for a freelance developer who can join us onsite at George Mason University, which is located 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 and will close the position on November 15.

Designers and developers will now be able to create a page about their plugin on omeka.org and upload their addon to share it with the world.

Designers should read the Designing a Theme page, and plugin developers should read the Building a Plugin page. Both designers and developers will also want to read the details about Preparing your addon for the omeka.org addons lists.

We hope that this will help our community expand and learn from each other, while also helping designers and developers publicize their hard work.

Please keep in mind that the system is new, and surprises could happen. Please help us improve the system either by asking about it on our dev list, or by submitting an issue about it on GitHub.

Some online repositories expose their metadata through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), an “initiative to develop and promote interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content.”

We here at CHNM developed Omeka with interoperability as a key feature from its early stages. We also envisioned that Omeka would facilitate the sharing of digital collections and archives across institutions and individuals. For example, a regional cultural consortium could highlight collections in an Omeka site featuring digital objects from local museums, galleries, and libraries focused on on thematic topics or for the purpose of celebrating a local anniversary or special event.

Never tried this sharing thing? All you need to do is to install the OAI-PMH Repository to expose data, and tell someone–either through our list of harvestable Omeka sites, or with the OAI community. The plugin reads an Omeka collection as a set. If you have no collections, your entire archive may be exposed.

If you’re interested in testing out the OAI-PMH Harvester plugin, try these examples of harvestable sets. (Don’t worry, you may delete the harvest when you’re done testing.):

• Library of Congress OAI-PMH sets (no files, but contain many sets of item metadata): http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/oai2_0
• Bibliothèque Numérique – Université Rennes 2, University Libraryhttp://bibnum.univ-rennes2.fr/oai-pmh-repository/request?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc
• Bracero History Archive: http://braceroarchive.org/oai-pmh-repository/request

The page of harvestable sets is small and we would like to see it grow. Sign into the wiki, add your base URL, and let the Omeka community know if you are exposing your data. Thanks for sharing!

First, we have done some housekeeping work on our main documentation page. We’ve removed some clutter and added some better developed resources to make it easier for you to find what you need to get started.

Second, for people writing themes or plugins, or just making tweaks and adjustments to existing one, we have done some work to formalize and clarify how to write documentation for functions. We’ll be aiming to revise existing documentation to make it consistent with that template. This will be a community effort. Following a call to help us make Omeka better, we have a documentation working group of active Omeka users to whom we are very grateful for helping with that effort.

Last, we have introduced a new component to our documentation: “recipes” that provide real problems and solutions that the community has encountered. Like the function documentation, we invite anyone to register on the Omeka wiki and contribute. There is also a guide to how to write recipe pages. If you have created a particular effect or solved a small issue, you can help the Omeka community by sharing what you came up with. If you have learned from a thread in the Omeka forums, writing a recipe that distills your new knowledge is a great way to solidify it while you help others.