I’ve been asked if we can import 15 existing exhibit style sites in to our Omeka S instance.
Importing images via csv appears to be well trodden path and we can probably do that fairly easily. Import appears to support uploading to item sets or site pools which we could then refer to in our new site/s.
However a method for importing the actual site content (HTML) has thus far eluded me. CSV import doesn’t appear to cover it, nor does the CSV importer fork.
I’ve tried searching here for discussions but weirdly I can’t find anything which covers what I need - except one discussion that may be relevant but I couldn’t quite be sure if it is or not. This makes me suspect I’m searching for the wrong thing.
Has anyone gone this route before and can provide some information surrounding uploading site content using existing HTML?
I have an idea for you, will be able to respond in more detail later. It’s the same idea I’ve been thinking about using. Omeka-S uses concept of sites to both replace “exhibits” and expand options for item pools with different user experience/needs.
Daniel B’s UpgradeToOmekaS module handles upgrading existing exhibits in Omeka Classic into sites according to the UI for that module, which I have been starting at extensively over the past 2 weeks You can’t have the latest version of Exhibits, and there are probably other caveats.
But as a start, take a test Omeka Classic site (or a clone of the one with exhibits), and install this module and walk through the screens and see what happens:
Hi Ben,
Thanks for your response , it seems I was unclear when asking my question (lack of familiarity with Omeka!).
The sites in question aren’t actually Omeka sites - they’re static HTML sites built 10-15 years ago for exhibiting a variety of topics.
Although I don’t have a solution yet, after posting yesterday I did discover pages can be created via the API; this may be a feasible solution if the sites I’m working with are able to be parsed and processed sanely.
Ah ok! And also you can consider going directly into the database (if you dare!)
In Omeka-S, you can create as many sites as you need. Other than the primary site, each exhibit site you have would be an additional site within Omeka-S. Within each site, you can create pages that are constructed with various block elements, of which I think you could dump your existing page HTML (within an exhibit site) into a single one. Something like that.
As a follow up to this the scripts I did for this are now on GitHub - there are some which haven’t been pushed and I hope they’ll follow in coming months.
While not perfect they got our project underway so may help someone else in the right direction too.
Just looking into this now… after realizing that the plugin referenced below (to compact the URL string for the root site of Omeka-S) only functions at the domain level, not sub-folder - which implies I need to import all of the legacy static HTML pages on the domain level INTO Omeka-S.
You can’t have the latest version of Exhibits, and there are probably other caveats.