Aside from exporting item metadata as a CSV, or copying a page, is there any possible way to export entire pages to a different site or a different Omeka S installation? The situation that I’m facing is that our instance had a latent disk corruption error and the site crashed once it ran out of disk space, forcing a recovery to the oldest snapshot from 3 months ago. (I’m not part of the server team, so I am not sure what their next steps are for trying to recover data in the interim. I figured I would try to get a sense for what might be possible so I can present to my boss in case the data is unrecoverable.) In the case that they can restore the site temporarily to a more recent backup, which they avoided doing because of the disk corruption, would it be possible to port any of the pages over to a new installation, either through the admin panel or by copying folders directly off the server? I’m prepared for that to be more complicated than it sounds, just trying to explore options for now.
As far as I understand, there is no straightforward module such as that available for importing items.
However, sites and pages are very much available through the APIs, so this should very much be doable.
For example, if you look at the Omeka S sandbox test install API endpoint:
https://dev.omeka.org/omeka-s-sandbox/api
You will see a sites endpoint and a site_pages endpoint.
They seem complete, so I suppose that even by using the REST API it should be possible to retrieve data from one side, and create them on another instance. If item identifiers match, media should also work.
Perhaps others are aware of already existing solutions or scripts.
Our institution (University of Rochester) has toyed with the idea of creating a sites exporter/importer process for managing our various Omeka S instances. I could likely get approval in coming weeks to start the process of developing one, especially if this were something I could work collaboratively with another institution on in order to reduce the amount of development work needed. Would you like to discuss such a collaborative project further?
This is good to know, thank you.
That sounds like a great project, but I don’t know what my organization could offer. We’re doing things on a budget for now, with Omeka being a kind of pilot for future sites. (To be clear, this error has to do with the server setup, not with Omeka software.) I’m a History grad student with a tech background, but I’m not a programmer. My role ends mid-May, but they might keep me on through the summer now. In the process of building out this site, people have come up with a number of wish list items that could be accomplished with a professional agency, so it’s possible that if they keep using Omeka they will look into that. That would happen a little further down the line though. Happy to discuss if you think we could contribute in other ways.
I should perhaps mention also the “obvious”. You mention:
so, if they can do that, then… problem solved? I mean, either you start off from that website, or simply export the database and move it to a new install, keeping everything that was with it (items, pages, users, etc. ). This probably would be a task for the “server team”, as you call it, but usually pretty much a straightforward one.
Unless, in the meantime you are adding new contents to a separate install… in that case, some more thinking would need to go into which one should serve as starting point.