News Building Thanks, Roy

The weekend after the untimely passing of Roy, we decided to make a tribute site, where anyone could post stories or images of Roy. Thanks, Roy now has over 90 contributions to the site, contributions to make you smile, laugh, cry, and most of all appreciate the impact Roy had on those who knew him. Roy had long been a strong proponent of our work on Omeka, so it seemed very appropriate to use the system to power a site dedicated to him. I think that Roy would have been pleased with the work that Thanks, Roy represents, and the potential that Omeka has to help people build sites that mean something to them, to create community and to share with others.

We used Release Candidate 3 to power Thanks, Roy, and installed the Contribution plugin to collect stories, images, audio, and video from contributors. To make a new theme for Thanks, Roy I copied one of the pre-packaged theme that ships with Omeka, modified some HTML, adding a few static pages for the “How to Help” page and “Formal Notices” page, and created a new style sheet I edited the plugin form to remove any unnecessary fields (specifically demographic information for the contributor), and styled the form with CSS in the new public theme.

The basic public template used to power Thanks, Roy (without the header image) is packaged with Omeka now as the default theme. Additionally, RC3 includes the Contribution plugin used on Thanks, Roy to gather contributions. We’re in the process of making a directory of plugins on this site, so Omeka users can download and install any that aren’t already pre-packaged with Omeka, and eventually contribute plugins to be listed in the directory.

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