Featuring Omeka Exhibits in WordPress

I've been toying around with different ways to integrate WordPress and Omeka for our site at http://www.ohiocivilwar150.org/ and just thought I would share one handy approach for doing so. Aside from creating matching themes for each platform, this seems like it might be a next step for some projects.

In WordPress, you need two plugins (or possibly 3 - see below):

Featured Content Showcase
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/featured-content-showcase/

Page Links To
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/

Featured Content Showcase (FCS) adds a slideshow to your WordPress theme that you can use to easily feature posts using the WP post thumbnail feature (version 2.9+). Page Links To (PLT) adds the ability to override the URL of a post or page so that it redirects somewhere else (e.g. to an Omeka Exhibit).

Just create a "dummy" post with a thumbnail image, a title and brief description, mark it featured according to the FCS instructions and redirect the post to your exhibit using the PLT instructions. Pretty easy.

If you don't want the dummy posts to appear in your main blog feed or other areas of your site, you can use the Category Visibility plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-visibility-ipeat/).

Thanks for this!!! :) :) :)

Hi ebellempire, so how did you make it look like the omeka site was actually embedded into the collections page? Did you end up creating matching themes for both the Omeka and WP sites? Also how did you manage to have what apears to be the same domain name for the Omeka and Wordpress site? Thanks!

Hi,

Yes, I creating two matching themes and installed Omeka inside the WordPress directory (so the folder /omeka/ sits right next to /wp-content/), which helps create the illusion in the URL that this is just another page on the main site. But Omeka is running independent of WordPress.

PS: I handcoded the main WP navigation into the Omeka theme and created a dummy page in WP that points (using the Page Links To plugin) to the /omeka/ directory. Hope that helps.

THANK YOU!

I thought I'd give an update to this thread on how to use Wordpress itself to achieve the same result. Instead of installing plugins to get the same-site look, you can use Wordpress 3.0+ custom menus (if your theme supports menus) to add links to a menu which can link Wordpress pages (maintains slug updates) or link to the URL of an Omeka page. You can also add a template file to your theme or edit index.php or to show featured content although I'm sure some would find it easier to use the Featured Showcase Content plugin.

I'd like to point out that this method does not work for Wordpress Multisite. If the Omeka directory is within Wordpress (beside wp-content like is mentioned above) then mod_rewrite fights for precedence. Navigating to "your-site.com/omeka" would show a 404 page with your WP theme since WP doesn't have a page with the slug "omeka". The solution is to move Omeka up 1 directory. If however, you'd like a WPMU sub-site to mesh with Omeka like described above, it simply won't work with the URL structure described.

I'm working on a system that will have 1 instance of Omeka for a whole WP network; 1 collection or exhibit (via the exhibit plugin) per site. It will likely involve a stripped down Omeka theme with a WP template that uses a bit of AJAX to request pages from Omeka. I'll let you know how it goes.

Hello,
this conversation is really insteresting and useful!
I wonder if there is any update on migrating or forcing them into a closer collaboration! It would be nice to hear!

Csaba