Today we are pleased to release version 3.0.0 of Omeka S.
The Omeka Team has been hard at work on this version for the better part of this calendar year, and we think that end users and developers will be pleased with the outcomes. There were two primary drivers of work for this release: site and search improvements, and the shift to the Laminas framework.
First, we have transformed the way that items are associated with sites to make it possible for visitors to search across all the sites in an installation. This new feature returns item and set search results that list all of the sites in which those resources are used. To make this possible, we have engineered new ways for content creators to directly attach items to specific sites, from within the site, at the point of item creation, or by user. This specific assignment is key to facilitating searching across the sites. Within site settings, site users can decide whether they want their visitors to search within that specific site, or across all sites. In working on the new elements of item attachment, we have improved a number of aspects of the item edit interface, the search configuration, and the search results rendering.
There are a number of other site-related improvements in this release:
- The page browse list includes the date added/modified information for each page.
- Individual pages within a site can now be made private until they are ready to be published.
- We have updated the labels for roles in the site user permissions and the installation user permissions to reduce confusion.
All of these elements should improve the site creation, publication, and access possibilities for content creators and site visitors.
Second, with this version, the software uses as its framework the Laminas Project, which is the successor to Zend Framework. This shift necessitated a full review and update of the core code and the code of the modules. The move to the Laminas project is important for our module developers. We issued a code freeze two weeks ago to provide developers the time to update their modules, so we hope to see an influx of new versions appear in the Modules page soon.
This also means that once you update your core software to this version, you will also have to update all of your modules and themes to those that are compatible with version 3.0.0.
These highlights only begin to describe the full list of features, changes, and bug fixes that are included in the release. You can read more in the release notes. As always, we are grateful for the contributions of the developer community to Omeka core software and to their extensions.
Good luck with your updates!