The Omeka team is very happy to announce the release of version 1.3. As we mentioned in a previous post, if you’re currently running a version of Omeka older than 1.2, you’ll need to upgrade to 1.2 or 1.2.1 before you can upgrade to 1.3. Everyone will find something they like in 1.3, including upgraded versions of the Exhibit Builder and Simple Pages plugins. Below are some details of these new and updated features.
-
In Exhibit Builder 1.0, we’ve improved the interface for selecting items to display on exhibit pages, added a caption field for each item, and provided easier ways to sort sections and pages from the admin panel. Most importantly, Exhibit Builder now uses Omeka’s ‘themes’ directory instead of its own internal ‘exhibit_themes’ directory. This means you can now use any of the public themes in Omeka for your exhibit, and use that theme’s configuration options for each exhibit.
-
In SimplePages 1.0, we’ve improved the display of pages in public themes, added nested navigation for child pages, and provided a breadcrumb navigation.
-
Exhibit Builder 1.0 and SimplePages 1.0 both require Omeka 1.3, but they already come bundled with Omeka when you download it.
-
Sortable items browsing. We knocked off the oldest open ticket in our Trac and added a sorting to the items/browse pages. Simply click on one of the active table headers to sort items. Theme writers can also add this functionality to their own themes with a little bit of work.
-
Omeka now uses jQuery by default. All the Omeka admin scripts, and our plugins, use jQuery instead of Prototype. But if you’re using Prototype in your plugins and/or theme, don’t worry. We still bundle Prototype and Scriptaculous, and you can automatically load those libraries by checking a box in your admin’s Settings panel if needed.
-
JavaScript and CSS queueing. We’ve provided some methods for plugin and theme developers to add JavaScripts and style sheets to a queue, to help avoid loading the same javascript library more than once.
If you want a complete list of changes, check out the release notes or the changelog for Omeka 1.3, and download it today!