User Contributions

Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems that the two available themes don't include a "contribution" page/system for visitors? Even with the plugin installed? There's also no "login" so people with different access levels have access to different things on the frontend. Is this something I'd have to write myself?

The exemplar sites seem to have a way of doing this...

I'd love to use Omeka for my research project - it seems to be exactly what I'm after in terms of simplicity of use. The backend is great... but the frontend seems like it would need a lot of website design work, for which I have very limited skills, and no funding to get someone to do it for me!

Is there another template/theme "in the works" that we, as website-design-and-coding-limited-users could adapt to suit our needs, but which include the basic functionality for creating online, collaborative archives?

Hi pcoutas,

I'll try to answer all of your questions:

Ok, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems that the two available themes don't include a "contribution" page/system for visitors? Even with the plugin installed?

The Contribution plugin does create a page for the contribution form, located at http://example.com/contribute/, where example.com is the path to your Omeka installation. You're right that Omeka currently requires some modifications to have your public theme

To make a link to contribution form, I recommend opening up common/header.php in the theme your using, and adding the following inside the nav() function:

'Contribute' => uri('contribute')

So, if you're using the default theme, your entire nav() function should look like this:

<?php echo nav(array('About' => uri('about'), 'Items' => uri('items'), 'Exhibits' => uri('exhibits'), 'Collections'=>uri('collections'), 'Contribute' = uri('contribute'))); ?>

You can change 'Contribute' to whatever you want the text of the link to be in your main navigation.

There's also no "login" so people with different access levels have access to different things on the frontend. Is this something I'd have to write myself?

There is a login for the admin, at http://example.com/admin/users/login/, where example.com is the path to your Omeka installation. Its currently not possible to have the login form on the public theme, or to have the public sign up for user accounts, so you or an administrator would need to create user accounts for other people. But we're in the process of making a plugin that I think will solve your problem.

I hope this helps! Let us know if we can provide more assistance.

I forgot to mention that we have documentation on how to use the Contribution plugin with your themes here: http://omeka.org/codex/Contribution_plugin

What worries me about the Contribution plugin (with no sign-in options) is spam. I run several blogs and wikis and the spam is a killer.

I really like the Contribute idea (it would be very good for a shared/consortial project that I work with), but open contributions make my knees weak.

Bethnicol--

Have you thought about adding reCAPTCHA (http://recaptcha.net/) to your contribution form to control spam? I don't think we want to bundle the software with the standard contribution program because not everyone will want to use it, but it should be fairly easy to add it to your site and should eliminate most of the spam.

Tom

This might not be the appropriate place for this question/comment, but I'm wondering if it's possible to add "website" to the options that a user can contribute with all the associate metadata that an admin-created item would have.

The contribution plugin was designed to accept specific item-types, which are hard coded into the plugin itself. The plugin's features reflect uses of the plugin to date, and there's currently no pre-packaged configuration file to customize that, and we have no plan to offer all DC metadata through this public-facing form.

Luckily, Omeka is open source software and you can accomplish a lot by hacking some code. To accomplish what you're looking for, you'd have to modify the plugin, including the Contribution Controller and create a new partial for the item type. It's possible to add 'website' to the drop-down menu for the contribution plugin by following the example code from other item-types. And although the contribution plugin was not designed to allow users to enter all the associated metadata for items, it's once again possible to modify the plugin to do so.

If you have specific questions about hacking the plugin I can help out -- best of luck.