I’ve written about my personal project using the Omeka tool in the past, but wanted to provide an update that I recently updated to Omeka 2.0. Here is the news piece from the Omeka blog: http://omeka.org/blog/2013/01/24/omeka-2-0-drops-today/
However, updating from my previous install to the brand new 2.0 version took a little work – especially because I made a relatively major mistake in (somehow) deleting one of the thumbnail files that Omeka requires. The site is working, but I learned a few valuable lessons in the process.
- Back up all files. I had to rely on the back up service that bluehost provides. Well that worked just fine in this case, it was scary to think that data might have been lost. Lesson learned.
- Open source rocks. I had to post a question on the Omeka help forum and was amazed at the quick and helpful response. Also, reading through the other postings was extremely helpful in seeing what the problems are and seeing what others are trying to do. It was great.
- DYI is the way to go. Even though I had a few hours of fear and confusion, doing this myself has taught me so much about websites work and are built. Even without changing the files, I’m getting a better sense of how things like SQL, PHP, and CSS all relate to each other.
I could offer a more technical version of how to do this install – but following the steps they have posted eventually worked for me. I’ll update more as a I play around in Omeka 2.0, but wanted to share my progress so far.