Researching and testing Omeka's features

In the past couple of weeks, I have been exploring other sites using Omeka to see if they use Omeka’s features effectively and to discover the different plugins that are available. I found a few good examples that we can refer to when building our site, because they have added plugins and features to make their sites more interactive, which is something we would like to do. Here are a few of the sites that I liked and are similar to ours that I think we should use as examples:

http://vagovernmentmatters.org
I like this site because it has great organization and has similar pages that we’d like to have: activities, case studies, and teaching resources. Each item has a picture and short description to make browsing easier. They also incorporated a lot of plugins: Coins, Simple Pages, Custom Routes, Dropbox, Exhibit Builder, Tag Bandit, MyOmeka, OaiPmhRepository

http://www.civilwarinart.org
When you first enter this site, it is very visually impressive. I also really like the “classroom projects” tab, which features 3 different lesson plans available for middle school and high school teachers to use in their classrooms. The lesson plans are designed to take 5 class periods and are very well planned out. We should definitely look at these lesson plans when creating ours. However, they didn’t use any additional plugins besides the most basic ones that Omeka offers.

http://www.floridamemory.com
This site has the greatest variety that I’ve seen. There are photographs, documents, timelines, educational resources, video, and audio. I think this is a great example of a site that works as an “online classroom”--something we would like to incorporate into our site.

I’ve also been doing some more research on Omeka’s features and how we can best utilize them. We just got the server installed this past week and so far, I’ve installed the "Simple Pages", "Collection Tree", and “Contribution” plugins. I have been playing around the the features of the plugins and have tested the Contribution plugin as a site visitor. I was able to contribute both stories (by writing text or uploading a text file, or both) and images (by uploading an image). There are a few minor problems that I have with this plugin, but I’ll work more to see if I can adjust the settings to fix these. I will also continue installing and testing more plugins that we might be interested in using.

-Amanda