Today we are pleased to release the 2.0.0 version of Omeka S!
Since the Omeka team is committed to making Omeka S the web publishing platform that fits the user community’s needs, this version includes a number of important new features that respond to end-user and developer feedback. Though there is long list of changes that you can review in the release notes, a couple that deserve to be highlighted:
- The software provides a vastly improved search experience. While the earlier versions of Omeka S only allowed for searching across resources (items, item sets, and media), the search now covers all resources and pages within a site. This means that users will be able to search descriptive data and text content on pages. Moreover, the search speed is improved, and users have access to familiar searching techniques such as searching for scattered keywords and using quotation marks to indicate exact phases. Finally, users can search against the titles of resources that are linked values for item properties. This capacity adds to the usability of Omeka S’s linked data infrastructure.
- This version of the software includes improvements to your control over the display of titles and descriptions for resources. While administrative users have long been able to select properties to display as the title or description for resources in a site, now that selection can be made at the resource template level rather than the site level. As a result, a site that brings together resource of many different types and different descriptive models will be able to display the most appropriate information as the title or as the description. This template level setting holds for the display of content both with the public and the administrative interfaces. It also means that sorting of items by title will be more intuitive and accurate in all of those environments.
Because this release includes increased minimum system requirements (PHP 7.1 and MySQL 5.6.4) you will need to upgrade your modules and themes when moving to v2.0.0. All of the modules and themes developed by the Omeka team have been updated to accompany this release. Since we have an active developer community, nearly half of our modules have been created by people outside of the Omeka team. Those modules may take some time to catch up to this version, so always check the suggested core version that accompanies the module listing in the directory. If your mission-critical modules and themes have not been updated, you’ll want to wait to upgrade until they have.
Happy upgrading and don’t forget to share your sites with us!