Combining Contribution and MyOmeka plug-ins

I have couple questions/ideas about combining the Contribution form and MyOmeka that I think might be fruitful if I can figure it out. We have students uploading items via a modified Contribution form and then building MyOmeka Posters from those materials. A lot of them get confused/annoyed by the fact that their contributions don't automatically appear in their MyOmeka Dashboard. I think this would be a great addition to MyOmeka and it probably wouldn't be too difficult to implement.

Adding a Contribute link to the Dashboard is easy enough, and I could remove the form from the public nav so it seemed part of the Dashboard, and provide a link back to the Dashboard from the form (and the verification screen) as well.

Next, I'm thinking I can retrieve user contributions by checking the user id (their email address) and then pulling in the user's contribution files as a detailed list. That should be fairly simple.

But to make something available for Posters, we need a user tag or note, so I'm hung up there. How could you do that? Should you do that? One possibility might be to add a hidden field to the form so that if a contributor is a MyOmeka user (and they would have to be if I hid the form from non-users), the item would be assigned the tag "poster item" or something. This would probably cause an error unless it happened after the item was added, so maybe after agreeing to the term, the next page to load would be a "Do you want to add this to your Dashboard?" dialogue. In fact, that last step would probably be sufficient now that i think about it.

Anyway, I'll be working on this here and there as time allows and will share results, but if anyone wants to share some helpful code now, I will love you forever.

Erin

Hi Erin,

Interesting idea. You could modify the contribution plugin, so that whenever a user is logged in and makes a contribution, a note and tag such as "contribution" is saved. This would make the item visible on the user's dashboard, and require a minimum amount of work. How does that sound?

Dave

That sounds perfect actually. How would I do that? (I would think you just add a hidden field to Contribution's indexController.php file, but I'm not sure how to test for the user and send that tag to myOmeka)

Hello again. I'm still trying to figure this out. Any help would be appreciated.

How can I add a hidden field to the contribution form that will send a preset tag (e.g. "contribution") to the users' myomeka dashboard?

Thanks.

Still trying to figure this one out...

1) How can I add a hidden field to the contribution form that will send a preset tag (e.g. "contribution") to the users' myomeka dashboard if the user is logged in?

2) How can I require that a user be logged into MyOmeka to access the Contribution form?

I've already hacked a new navigation scheme into both to give the appearance of integration but so far these changes elude me.

These two things would make my life so, so much easier and would really go a long way in furthering our use of Omeka in a classroom setting, where we need to maintain some quality control (via a modified Contribution form with preset metadata like controlled vocab for subjects) but also want to give some autonomy (using MyOmeka for various tasks).

Any help would be greatly appreciated as always. And I think it's safe to say, this is not one of those forum posts that I will answer myself if given enough time (I tend to do that).

Thanks,

Erin