We’re somehow already halfway into March, and our winter term is drawing to a close. As I did at the end of fall, I’d like to give an overview of the work that I have done over the last 10 weeks as the backend web development intern for digital scholarship.
I began the term working on the OmekaFootnotesJS plugin, which is a plugin that adds interactive JavaScript footnotes to Omeka sites. OmekaFootnotesJS makes it easy for users to add footnotes to their text when creating pages, and similarly easy for readers to access footnotes when reading the published text, by clicking on footnote numbers.
OmekaFootnotesJS was developed by various digital scholarship interns over the last 2 years and worked well, but updates from Exhibit Builder and Simple Pages (2 Omeka plugins that allow users to create pages) caused some of our plugin’s functionality to stop working. Much of my work this term consisted of fixing all of these bugs, and I was able to get OmekaFootnotesJS functional again by updating the PHP file (the core plugin file) as well as restructuring the JavaScript file that is responsible for actually creating and updating the footnotes. At the end of the term, we issued a new release of OmekaFootnotesJS on Digital Carleton’s GitHub page.
Later on in the term, I began working on modifying Omeka’s Exhibit Builder plugin to give researchers increased capabilities. As a general overview, an Omeka site can have various types of users: administrators (who have close to full control of the site, being able to add and publish their own content as well as controlling content created by other users), contributors (who can create their own items but cannot publish them), and researchers (who can log on to the admin side of an Omeka site but do not have the permission to do anything).
Given that in past projects we have found it helpful for researchers to be able to view unpublished exhibits on an Omeka site (in addition to published exhibits to which they already have access), I was tasked with modifying the Exhibit Builder plugin’s code, in order to give administrators the ability to allow researchers to view unpublished exhibits. I was able to get this working by going through the plugin files and extending the function that grants access to certain users, and adding an option in the plugin configuration form for administrators to control the researcher’s access to exhibits. After finishing this, I submitted a pull request to Omeka, in case they want to include the added functionality in their next release of Exhibit Builder.
That pretty much sums up my work for the term; I certainly learned a lot more about not only developing plugins through writing code, but also the plugin development cycle as a whole. I’m looking forward to seeing what next term brings!
