I’ve recently learnt that Omeka S is the platform ideal for humanities related projects. I originally installed the basic Omeka that comes with cpanel to test that but that didn’t work well at all, so was eager to try out Omeka S.
However, after 20 years of using WordPress, I’m shocked to find this much lauded platform is still behind on SEO, that’s 25 years after I started an SEO business in Sydney and 20 years after I closed it, training businesses on how to properly write the code and include the content in each individual webpage, with full uris, so that each page can be detected by search engines and then found by people – the main point!
So, rather than happily launch a site with lots of items and details about the vintage science fiction stories I’ve discovered in a few hours so that it can be found by the entire world, instead I’ve wasted literally days trying to get various themes to be a) indexed by search engines and b) generate an acceptable citation using sites like zbib, c) show my information in a reasonably acceptable and visually appealing format, and d) enable it to store all the information I want it to in the correct order.
Not only that, but I can see what a huge timewaster this program is for the initial setup. Those just entering information once its set up will think it is amazing. But the developers will be pulling their hair out. It takes several clicks and several more minutes to do the same thing in Omeka S than in WordPress. (Why have 4 to 5 different places that need to be looked at to change settings for almost every module? Theme, CMS, site, sometimes module, and sometimes even page level? Yes, you can set an override for some modules at the CMS level but if that doesn’t work, guess what, the theme has probably overridden it!)
In my brief look I think about 80% of the important modules have been made by a single person and there’s no way you can ask a single person to be constantly updating hundreds of modules every time the main site is updated. A number of times I’ve had to rewrite a theme to get something to work, just to see something else break and…
I mean, no way of adjusting the size of columns? You need a particular theme to add a right column? You need to edit the html to get the right size image into a page and then the browse link still resizes it? Why do I need to add another module for one tiny adjustment? Why are thumbnails showing up as large images? Why…
27 modules I’ve tried wipe the entire site out and I’ve got to go into file manager on the server and delete those modules to get the site back again. So many modules are listed without actually indicating whether they’re compatible with Omeka 4.1.1. so I’ve just had to guess that anything older than 2024 isn’t going to work.
I won’t bore you further but just to say that the list of updates this platform needs is endless.
What I do like about it though is that this is a humanities designed content management system. That means it comes with expected fields for exhibited items. If you’re not working in a museum or archive and don’t know the kind of fields researchers expect to see in metadata, this information is amazing. As a springboard for the kind of information I wanted to get out there it is a useful foundation. These fields or ‘properties’ are included in a basic resource template and you can add modules (!!!) to get more properties to add to the resource template. Thankfully I quickly found out about custom ontologies so I was able to create my own, although it is difficult to override some of the Dublin Core settings as they seem to control everything.
So, vent over, I’ve finally got my Omeka S site to the level of, well, the kind of website I might have expected to see in 2010. I’ll put some more time into it over the next month and see if I can get it to at least 2015. It’s not possible to improve its basic operation beyond that, unfortunately. And I’ve had to disable guest researcher registration as there isn’t a working antispam plugin (module) that’ll stop bot registrations. If you’d like to download any of the media on the site that is associated with an item, email me directly at contact (at) infiniteanthologies.com and I’ll create one for you.
The next step is to add the kinds of features that no website has, so that’ll be some hard coding as well as determining what can be integrated into Omeka S, or whether I’ll have to add a subdomain with WordPress.
We’ll see. My next post will be a bit lighter, on the soft launch of InfiniteAnthologies.com
<This is my late April post which I didn’t get around to finishing until May. Keeping the April date!>
