I have been having lots of trouble getting Omeka plugins (like the YouTube Plugin, the Vimeo Plugin, and the Neatline Plugin) to work on an Omeka Classic site that’s on Reclaim Hosting.
In particular, I would love to be able to get Neatline to work correctly, so I wonder if there is more recent documentation about this. It seems like there is lots of information dispersed throughout this Forum, in Plugin GitHub pages, on Reclaim webpages, and in the open internet in various library LibGuides, but I’m wondering if there is a single trusty place that shows how Reclaim Hosting, Omeka Classic, and Omeka plugins can work.
For the YouTube Plugin, I couldn’t get it to work until I found an exchange in GitHub. (I can’t post a link here because the Forum will let me post only two links.)
For the Vimeo plugin, there doesn’t seem to be documentation about how to get the access token, so I followed the advice at the bottom of this exchange:
So I made an app in my Vimeo account and got an unauthenticated token, and while I can now bring in Vimeo videos as items, I can’t get them to display in Exhibit pages.
For Neatline, it looks like their installation documentation is out of date because it doesn’t reflect the current Google Maps pages associated with APIs. (I can’t post a link because of the two-link limit.)
And I found this exchange in the Forum that seems to reflect the problems I’m experiencing:
That is, when I select OpenStreetMaps for Neatline Exhibits (thinking that I won’t need a Google Maps API), it doesn’t work. And, now, even with a Google Maps API, it still doesn’t work.
And now I’m wondering if it’s a PHP path issue. I can’t post the link here, but Reclaim hosting has a link in their support pages about PHP paths and Omeka.
So it seems like none of these plugins really work–that, or it’s hard to find documentation in one place to get the combination of Omeka Classic/Reclaim/Omeka plugins working.
One of the issues here is that these plugins are developed by folks in the community and not by the Omeka Team. That’s great but it means that their documentation doesn’t live in a central place like the Omeka end user manual.
Often developers include documentation in the README files on Github.
The Neatline package in particular has been developed by the folks at UVA’s Scholar’s Lab and has documentation of its own. They are attentive to the forums here and do respond if you have questions.
The issue with the PHP path is about plugins that need to run processes in the background. That is unlikely to be case for the plugins you mention, but is the case with things like the CSVImport where a job starts and runs while you are doing other things.
In sum, Omeka isn’t the issue, and Reclaim isn’t the issue. The problem is that the plugins might not be appropriately maintained (is the version updated to work with the version of Omeka Classic you have installed?) or that the plugins are maintained, but that their individual documentation hasn’t been updated. If you don’t get an answer from the plugin developers to specific questions here on the forums, it is best to leave them an issue/question on Github where they will get a direct alert to your issue.
I’ve left a GitHub issue about the Vimeo one and the Neatline one, but the Neatline plugin, in particular, is the one I’d love to to have functional, and I don’t really know what to do because its documentation is out of date and doesn’t mention anything about Reclaim particulars:
My hope was that someone here on the Forum had successfully gotten the combination of Reclaim/Omeka Classic/Neatline Plugin (2.6.4) to work and documented the steps.