Deco is a free theme for Omeka. Though I started working on an Omeka theme for use by a more general audience and without any particular motivation beyond having a lame sense of fun, as I got going, I realized it might be really useful for the group of social studies teachers with whom I’ve been working this past week. As part of a grant-funded workshop, the teachers needed to start their own WordPress- and Omeka-based websites (for use in their classrooms). As you might expect, none of the teachers had experience with such things. After an arduous 4 hour workshop in which the group got all of their hosting plans purchased and sites installed and configured, we kind of slowly came to a realization that there was still foundational work to be done. Though Omeka is quite user friendly, it’s still best managed (in a self-hosted environment that is), by users having at least some experience with and understanding of web publishing. (omeka.net is a great hosted alternative by the way, and works much like wordpress.com, but for various reasons was not right for our project). And so the scope of this little side project grew as I tried to anticipate some of the problems novice users might encounter.
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Following on my previous entry on adding an image Lightbox to Omeka, today I’ll run through the steps it takes to get a featured image gallery running on your Omeka homepage. I searched for awhile to find a gallery plugin that a.) looks good, b.) works well and c.) is not too complicated for me to figure out. Fitting the bill nicely, I found GalleryView, a fairly lightweight jQuery plugin with lots of options for…
Maybe it’s just me, but I had a heckuva time trying to figure out how to implement Lightbox 2 in Omeka. After piecing together info and code from here and there, then adding my own little improvements, I’ve constructed a simple little 4-step guide to document the process and, hopefully, help make this process a little less vexing for others out there who aren’t PHP and Java Script pros.
One of the nice features of WordPress is the ability to create static homepages. While most blogs use the standard configuration, where users scroll vertically from the most recent to older blog posts, it often makes sense to use a static homepage instead — especially if you are looking to create a more professional looking site, or are using WordPress as a Content Management System. I recently tackled a project where we needed to create…
