Error when changing the birth_year variable.

Hello all,

Instead of birth_year we want a category of the current status of people involved with our university. I figure the easiest way to do this is to change change the birth_year to accept more than just numbers.

I'm having issues with changing the birth_year for contributors to something else. I've edited it from an integer in the database to varchar however I'm still getting an error that reads "Invalid type named CurrentStudent provided!" when trying to insert CurrentStudent as birth year.

The original code looks like this:

<div class="field">
<label>Birth Year:</label>

<input type="text" name="contributor[birth_year]" value="" id="birth_year" />
</div>

The code I've changed looks something like this:

<label>Your Status:</label>
<p>
<?php
select(array('name'=>'type', 'id'=>'birth_year'),
array('CurrentStudent'=>'Current Student','CurrentFaculty'=>'Current Faculty','CurrentStaff'=>'Current Staff', 'Alumni'=>'Alumni', 'FormerFaculty'=>'Former Faculty', 'FormerStaff'=>'Former Staff', 'Other'=>'Other'), empty($_POST['birth_year'
]) ? 'Document' : h($_POST['birth_year']));
?>

Hi, unfortunately the current iteration of the Contribution plugin is fairly rigid with respect to the optional data that can be entered.

If you look in the database, you'll see that the 'birth_year' field in the contributors table is only a year(4) field, which means you can't enter text into it.

Unfortunately this is the same in the upcoming release of the Contribution plugin for Omeka 1.0, but after this release we are going to reassess the feature set of the plugin and perhaps rework the thing to make it more flexible overall, so your feedback on that is appreciated.