Scholars' Lab

If you’ve done much web development, you’ll know that deploying applications can be a real pain. Typically you get some code (like Omeka), FTP it to your server, run the install, then go grab some plugins and themes and FTP them to your server. If you’re a bit more sophisticated, you may have put this in to an source code management (SCM) system like git, mercurial, or subversion, which then changes your workflow to editing on your local machine, committing the changes to your SCM, logging on to the command line interface for your server, running an update on the code, praying nothing breaks; if it does, you then try to roll back to a working version (you remembered to run svn info on the code before updating so you know what number to go back to). Even if everything goes swimmingly, that’s a lot of steps and way more applications than I like to fool with, and since it’s essentially doing the same thing over and over again, wouldn’t it be nice to automate this process? » Read the rest of this entry «

As part of our ongoing efforts on our Neatline grant, we needed to include a way of displaying temporal information and interacting with other data stored in Omeka. Just about the time we were starting to write this code, CHNM announced their Plugin Rush which pays an honorarium to give folks some incentive to pitch in and develop a plugin or two. Since we were going to develop the plugin anyway, we’re donating this back to the Omeka project, but we thought this might be a good opportunity to talk a little more about the development cycle for Omeka plugins, and hopefully inspire others to get involved. » Read the rest of this entry «

We’re pleased to announce that the inaugural issue of our monthly newsletter is now available for download. The newsletter will highlight projects currently in progress in the Scholars’ Lab, report on professional activities of the Scholars’ Lab staff, and list monthly events. If you have suggestions for projects that you’d like to see highlighted in future newsletters, please email me at rag9b@virginia.edu.

Scholars’ Lab News for April 2010 (PDF version)

Scholars’ Lab News April 2010 (text-only version)