Gratitude for the Cross Site Search

[sanjinmuftic]

Hi all,

So this message is just gratitude to the platform Omeka S and to all the people that support and build it.

We have been busy using Omeka S as the showcase platform for our university (https://ibali.uct.ac.za), and we had been working on a number of different sites each linked to a collection. Recently we also had to migrate a lot of digital items from our old digital collections platform onto Omeka S. Each of those collections got its own site and its own theme, etc.

We had a request to make the whole site searchable for items, and based on my experience so far I was struggling with this, thinking that I would have to load all the items as resources into our main landing site, and would then have an issue to link out to the particular site where that item is originally part of so that it could be viewed as intended (instead of in the main site theme).

And then yesterday in our team meeting, as we were discussing this issue, and we activate the below:

and put in a search query, we all watched in wonder as the links that were shown for the search query took us directly to the SITE that the item belongs.

I am not sure why we did not realise this before (too much csv imports), and it is probably obvious to everyone on the forum, but for us it just solved a whole issue, and just showcased the power of the platform. And we love it.

So thank you.

[jflatnes]

Thanks for your kind words.

Enabling cross-site search, and more generally any features that list out which site(s) an item belongs to, was the main reason we changed the way that items were attached to sites in Omeka S 3. This involved a pretty major change to how sites worked, but we felt that the kinds of features it enabled made it a necessary and valuable change.

We called it out prominently in our announcement of the release.