This post documents further adventures using Omeka, this time to build a site and set up an exhibit therein.

Making the decisions on what to call the site and what it should be about was more difficult than actually setting up the site, which only required entering these details in the appropriate boxes.

Adding items to the site and entering metadata into the Dublin Core fields went smoothly, being a known process already discussed in an earlier post.

To install the required plugins, I only had to go to plugins in the navigation bar and then click install next to the ones I needed.

Next I started to build an exhibit from some of the items I had uploaded, this was begin by selecting Exhibits from the left hand menu. From here I could add an exhibit, give it a name and description, and start adding pages. I also added some navigation instructions here.

I decided to let each page I added cover some extent of time for which I could include at least a couple of the items I had added to the site. The breakdown I ended with is seen below. The pages had to be reordered to be in chronological sequence, which was merely a matter of dragging them into the right order.

Entering the editing for each page, I had to choose more titles, and then select what type of blocks I wanted to use to build the page. For this project I simply chose file. Adding each file block prompted me to choose which item(s) I wanted to appear there, and to add captions explaining what I wanted viewers of the exhibit to know about the items I grouped together in each page. Again, these blocks could be (and were) reorganized by dragging them into a sensible order.

To get the exhibit to be accessible from the home page, I added it to the top navigation bar, using the Appearance settings in the admin bar to find my way to where said navigation bar could be edited.

As seen above in what I selected as a Homepage, I also added an Introduction page to the site using Simple Pages in the lefthand menu. This was again very straightforward, though I had to remember how to use HTML tags again. Here I explained what the site was about and how to use it to either view the exhibit or browse all items.