People have requested a way to update plugins from the admin side of Omeka for a while. This approach takes a round-about approach, depending on GitHub.

In the dashboard, you now have a panel like this

The “Update plugins” page gives:

Click Update….aaaaannnndddd…..

Ta-daaa!

I’d meant to blog about this following the talk at WebWise about competitions, but sadly never did it. So I’ll try to redeem myself here.

Challenges/Competitions, much like THATCamp Prime’s own Maker Challenge, are a great way to facilitate open and wacky innovation.

Anyone want to talk about experiences or ideas with them? What works and what doesn’t? Best practices for them to get the most out of them? Ideas or plans to take away to implement one locally?

Let’s see if coders and organizers can get together to put together some principles and ideas for how to make these things work on whatever scale.

Just a note for people planning to attend the Intro to Omeka Plugins workshop that it has been rescheduled to the first session after scheduling on Friday.

Why? For fame, glory, and fabulous prizes!

Whose fame, glory, and fabulous prizes? YOURS!

If you have an idea for an Omeka plugin and want to dive right in, you can make your work part of the THATCamp Challenge. Take what you learn at the workshop and start building, join other new and seasoned developers in the Makerspace (RRCHNM central in Research Hall, room 470), and build something new to show off at the end of THATCamp.

Good luck!

Q: Ever wanted to learn how to put together a new plugin for Omeka but wasn’t sure where to start?

A: This workshop!

We’ll look at the basic structure of an Omeka plugin and how the pieces fit together, then I’ll have some exercises ready for you to begin hacking on and expanding some example plugins.

Topics covered include creating a model for new kinds of content, understanding how Zend/Omeka connects URLs to controllers and views, and using best practices in Omeka’s code to make your life easier. The primary audience is people with some experience with PHP, especially Object-Oriented PHP, but the session will also be helpful to people who are beginners to coding in PHP and are curious about typical structures and paradigms for hacking on an Omeka installation.

We’ll be looking at Omeka code and going through activities that involve installing and manipulating example plugins, so you should come with an instance of Omeka 2.0 installed on your laptop.

UPDATE — links added!

We’ll be using the following three plugins as examples to help us learn some of the basic structures in Omeka plugins. Please come to the workshop with them installed in your Omeka site on your laptop — we’ll be directly editing them together and looking at the results on your laptop.

Click the ZIP link to download the plugin, or if you are a git user clone the repositories.

• Hooks and Filters
• Models
• Controllers and Views

And some exercises for during and/or after the session.