It’s Winter Break at North Park – this means my evenings are more free for side projects. A long-standing side project has been working on installing and stylizing a few Omeka sites. I’ve written some about this project already – but haven’t been as productive as I wish. But, ever the optimist, I thought I would press on with a brief update as well as some goals.

Here is a link to my Omeka project – http://www.meyerwebsite.com/omeka/

Creating a New Omeka Theme

First, that header is entirely untrue; I’m not creating a new Omeka theme – I’ve just borrowed and tweaked an existing theme! The theme I’m using is Deco and I’m tweaking it, pulling it apart, and otherwise changing it. It was a relatively easy process: first, copy the entire theme folder (from public_html/omeka/themes/deco) to a new folder ( to public_html/omeka/themes/coffee) and, second, change the theme.ini file with my own data. This was actually pretty easy.

Customizing the Main Page

Next, I wanted to customize the main page of my Omeka site. Essentially, I wanted to remove the second column and just have the contents span the entire width. I accomplished this by editing the index.php page. I could have done a better job keeping track of those changes – but I did backup that file beforehand – but it really wasn’t more difficult that just removing the two <div> markers.

Changing the Deco_Get_About function

I wanted to removed the awkward <h3> header from this function – I did this by deleting a bit of code from the custom.php file responsible for this. It was pretty easy and looks great!

Future Projects

A list of future projects/ideas for this theme:

• Create a cool logo to replace the text.
• Add a secondary set of page navigation tools to each item page.
• Change our collections are displayed.
• Change the item browse display.