 Well, hello everyone. Welcome to week one of splashing around with Installatron apps at our flex course for May of this year, which is crazy to think we're already five months through the year. I'm here with Amanda this this time. And we're super excited to kick off this month of the flex courses, our flex course on Installatron apps. And I think it's gonna be really fun. I'm excited to see how we go through like the different applications and everything that we're gonna talk about. So you might notice that this week or this month of the flex course is not WordPress related, which is crazy to think about. WordPress is primarily our main bread and butter at Reclaim for Installatron applications, but we wanted to take this time to look at some of the other applications we offer that are super cool within Installatron. Yeah. And I mean, I think I second Meredith's idea or point that this is really exciting. We're happy to do this. And while we have like some we're very comfortable with WordPress and we have a very strong WordPress user base, there we're definitely seeing a lot of interest and usage and potential for some of these other applications that we're going to talk about. So while, you know, we're certainly not experts on these applications, certainly not and even to the same extent that we are pretty comfortable with WordPress. We are also expanding our knowledge on them and we are excited to support them however we can. And we also, even for some of the ones that you may not be as familiar with on this list, we have some interesting takes on why they might benefit the community. Absolutely. Yeah. So this week in particular, we're looking at Omega and Omega S, or commonly known as Omega Classic and Omega S. So two different applications, but under the same development group. So we're also going to look at scalar URLs, URLs in Matomo through the next couple of weeks, all open source. And I'm looking forward to the last half too, because there are definitely some good alternatives to like Google Analytics and Bitly as well. So stay tuned for those. And we'll share some good resources there. So yes, so we are looking at Omega and Omega S today, particularly how each application is used and the differences between the two. So how you can use them in different ways within your classroom, or for projects and that sort of thing. So we'll go through each individually and then on that side and then how you might incorporate those. We'll look at some example sites towards the end. I've got some different projects throughout our reclaim infrastructure through domain of one's own and shared hosting users and how and they how each version of Omega is used within those applications from there. And then looking at how to install and install a Tron and some fun updates for Omega S in particular and some functions within install a Tron that now work for those. So we can go over over that side. And then some other things to keep in mind about manual updates through plugins and themes and what to look out for when working with those. So got those. And first, if you're not familiar with Omega, you might be like, what the heck is it? What is Omega and Omega and Omega S? Both are open source. And they are about or they are applications working with digital collections and aimed towards working with media rich exhibits. So this is a great way to visually encapsulate any projects or events in history and kind of create a collection of all different resources there. Omega or Omega Classic is a single site use case so you can have different elements within the exhibit of images, videos, audio recordings and even maps and timelines, which is really cool. And this is really centered around one topic. I kind of look at it as like a single WordPress site. I know I'm referring to WordPress in this instance, but that's kind of how my brain immediately goes to when I'm talking through the different versions of Omega. So Omega Classic tends to work towards one project or showcasing a few events. Within a larger event, you can build those collections and exhibits there using different themes and plugins within Omega Classic on that side. On the flip side, Omega S is good for multiple sites within one install. So this would equate to WordPress multi site within the Omega atmosphere. I've seen professors use this in their courses, and then assigning one site to each student. And so if it was an overall general course throughout the year on history of America, you could assign out like the 1930s or the 1940s to each student. And that would be one site per student as a project. So that's always really cool to see. So you can have multiple in the same sense as Omega Classic, you can continue to have multiple collections and exhibits with Omega S, you can make them their own site. So they'll have their own unique theme. And they can use different plugins as needed to help build out the site, the sub site as well. Awesome. So when you're getting started with Omega or Omega S, you can install with an install atron directly. Just super cool. One click installer and also handles automatic updates to the core versions. So all the files and folders within the application that allow it to run as a Mecca or a Mecca S. On the flip side for those you do have to manually update plugins and themes within the file manager, but we'll go through all of that as well. Install atron also incorporates the quick cloning feature so you can clone between locations if you're going to redesign a website but you want to keep the old one up. Cloning is really helpful to make sure you have a copy on each side. I feel like for installing Omega, it's very similar again to WordPress. Absolutely. Where install atron almost, I mean, install atron knocks you out of the park with WordPress support and setup. But Omega is kind of like the coming in second there. They they've definitely upped their game with being able to support Omega and being in keeping things running smoothly. And as we're going to talk about like making it even easier to add it to install atron, I think that the main thing that when I was an admin at a school was difficult for me to wrap my head around is that the one click login does not work the same in Omega for WordPress. And so something for folks here to keep in mind is that if you're having some issues with your Omega installation, and you need maybe us to look at the back end, we're not going to be able to get in as easily. We can't we can still get in but it would make the process go faster if you made us an account or something like that. So that we could get into the dashboard section because we don't have the same kind of like immediate access as we do to WordPress sites. Yeah, absolutely. And that is a good point about the password resets and everything. We have a little trick on our end to be able to like access the back side of things. And I actually was troubleshooting a ticket this week and figured out how to do it with Omega S instead of Omega Classic. So we're able to get access if you need help with anything, but we're not getting the password resets and all that good stuff. So we can bypass email password resets if needed on that side. So I do want to do a little demo as we go through installing Omega Classic and then Omega S and we can take a look at like the dashboards and kind of see how they're different. I think that's pretty cool. So I'm in my cPanel here and I'm going to install Omega and Omega Classic or Omega S. I keep getting them all mixed up in my head. So most of our shared hosing servers do have them for under featured applications and you can customize this list within domain of one's own, which is really helpful. So you can highlight the different applications that you want. So we've got Omega and Omega S up at the top here. I'm going to go ahead and install Omega Classic on my account. So I'm going to use sub folders and just leave CMS here for now. And then I'm going to change the username and the password super quickly. So I know what it is when I log in and then easy peasy one click to install down at the bottom of the page. Like it literally takes two seconds to install Omega and through install Tron, which is incredible. So all of those and that's going to process here and you'll see a couple options. You can go to let me zoom in actually realize my screen is probably a little too small. You can zoom in or click on the top URL to access the main site right away or even directly to the admin dashboard, which is what I'm going to do. And then you'll put in your username and password. Get logged in and you'll see your Omega Classic dashboard from here. You can move between different your items, collections, item types, and all of that sort of thing. So you can customize the types of items you want to upload. So if you have like a particular video, you can add that in here or customize if you're like documenting different quilting techniques to I've seen a site about quilting within Omega, you can create those as as types to kind of categorize your site and then put all of the items into the items section. You can modify any plugins. Here you'll see a list of all the plugins that are available for installation through your install. And we'll go through adding those really quickly too. In configuring on that side. And then same with themes, you'll see a couple of themes we have built in into the installer in installatron three in particular same with the plugins. And these are all set as defaults when you install a fresh copy. So it kind of gives you the base to get started. Yeah. Question. Yes. When it comes to adding a completely different theme or a completely different plugin. Is there a easy one click way to do that? Or is that going to be more involved? It's a little more involved. Unfortunately within install within Omega and Omega s you have you do have to go to the Omega repository for plugins and modules. I'm gonna look at that really quick. So Omega lists all of their plugins on a single page. Then they do this for Omega s too. So it's really handy to have this repository here. So it is a little bit more manual in the sense that you have to download the latest version from this page and then upload either through FTP or in the file manager to the plugins folder, extract the folder and then you can install. So I'll just do admin images as an example. I typically tend to use the file manager more than FTP for the scenario just because it's quicker, quicker clicks for me and I'm already in cPanel if I'm working on my Omega site. So I'm gonna be in public HTML. And then I'll go into the CMS folder. So you want to navigate to the directory where your application lives. Typically, we recommend that you do subdomains for Omega or installing it on the Apex domain. This is to prevent any issues with HT access rules, redirects or anything like that. If you're working with more than one application on your domain name. So if you wanted to have WordPress over top of your main domains like I have WordPress on my domain, meredithfiero.com, I would want to do omeka.meredithfiero.com. If I was working on a project to work with work through those applications, that just helps more with organization. You can even see on my file system, I've got tons of subdomains set up just in general testing. So you want to so that's really helpful to kind of isolate where a particular project is on that side from there. So I've got the admin images plugin downloaded, and then I'm going to move into the plugins folder. And you can see we've got coins, exhibit builder and simple pages. Those are the defaults included with our application installer. And then I'm going to upload the zip of the admin images. You want to make sure it's the zip not folder of the plugin itself. And then you go back in to extract the zip into the folder. And that's super quick. You'll see if I reload the page here, we'll see a folder for admin images, which is perfect. And if I go back to the plugins page on my dashboard, you'll see it's already there ready for installation at that point. Omega recognizes that the plugin folder is in the file system and is ready for installation at that point. So super cool. I will post the documentation on managing themes and plugins. And it's really important to keep track of the plugins that are installed on both Omega and Omega Classic to make sure that those are up to date before you update the site and particularly with Omega S. Omega S requires that all plugins and themes are using the most recent version at the point of update. So like, Omega S is at like 4.1. So once 4.1 is released, all plugins and themes need to use the latest version at that point to be updated. And I think another thing that might be helpful to point out is that you're not necessarily going to be told by this dashboard that an update is needed for your plugins. You're going to have to, you know, it's it's kind of an extra step where you're going to have to go and check and see if there's there is an update to that plugin. But like Meredith said, there's a handy page that has all of the plugins listed there. And when you click into each plugin, you can see, you know, it has the download link to the latest version and also just lists all the other versions. So if you know an update is coming to the main application, always workflow should be check plugins and themes first and see if you need to make any updates there. But Omega is not going to tell you from within the dashboard the way that WordPress would. Yeah, exactly. We have a lot of people use like GitHub repos because these are in GitHub as well to subscribe to notifications on release as well. So that's really helpful. Or using RSS feeds if there's there's one for for the particular plugins on that side. That's a good way to kind of aggregate notifications on that side. So that is a Mecca classic kind of a quick glance at the dashboard. We can go into Omega S as well. I'm going to uninstall this one just so there's no confusion. And while that's uninstalling, I'm going to install Omega S on the education subdirectory. And I'm super excited for this one because there were some changes with the way that install a Tron interacts with Omega classic, okay, or Omega S on that side. So I'm going to install this and kind of talk about what those changes are. So Omega S is fairly recent in the sense that I want to say it's been out for the last since I've been working at Reclaim, which is about five years at the point of this video, it came out about three to four years ago, and we built a custom installer for Omega S, which means that it wasn't managed through install a Tron. So we pulled an installation of Omega S created essentially a template. So kind of kind of what Taylor's been working on with the with the spot templates and all of that stuff across domain of one zone sites, we were able to replicate that across all servers. And then when we installed the application, there were two things that did not work when we use custom applications. And that was cloning, sorry, three things, cloning, importing a two year account, and across accounts, and restoring backups, which was super unhelpful at some points. But we were able to make some workarounds where we could like install a fresh copy of the the site and like compressed files to make sure that it was using the same, same version and all of this sort of stuff. So the workarounds we could work with. But recently with our custom application installer changes, we were able to submit Omega S to install a Tron for their repository. So now Omega S is available to any server that runs install Tron, which is super cool. And as a result of that, we gained access to restoring, importing and cloning, which is so much easier than than the workarounds. So I'm going to do that really quick because I just like I love that we can actually work on that from here. So I'm going to click clone on my Omega S application, and then just use Omega S. And we'll let it go. Might take a minute, but now you can clone applications or clone Omega S between different sites. So if you wanted to create like a template of one site and then move it over from project to project, that's super easy to do now with the cloning feature. You no longer have to move things over manually. So I've got my Omega S clone here. It's super cool. There. So all right, so we'll take a look at what the dashboard looks like really quick as well. So this definitely looks a little different between the two. So if I go to Omega, and then Omega S, you can see like it's definitely showing that it's two different applications there. For sure. So you'll see on the left, you can even even have your own site, different item sets, users modules. There is a little bit of language changes between Omega Classic and Omega S. So plugins are modules on that side. So you can see we don't have any currently set up in the application, but I'll go through like we did with Omega Classic to adjust the particular application. And within the site's profile, you want to create a new one. So I'll just create a test one super fast so you can see what it looks like when working with particular application or particular site to change like themes and all that good stuff. When you're in the main dashboard, it's kind of like the network admin dashboard for WordPress, you'll see a full list of everything like sites, items, all of that, and you can even navigate further into a particular site at that point. If you go to site admin, believe you'll be able to like make different pages, change the navigation for like menus, create new users and at like provide them with access to the particular site. So this is really helpful too for user management, but then you'll also go into items here and then add all of the items. So I guess within Omega S you have to add items to the main site and then assign it to particular sites on that side. So if I go to edit, you can check the theme. So this is the classic default theme that Omega S installs with each site. I'm going to grab a module really quickly and download that. So I'll do something similar like coins as well. And then move up in my file manager to my education directory, and then click on modules and upload the zip as well. So the same way that you would with Omega Classic. And you would do the same with the themes if needed. Any themes you might have from there. And actually, while I do that, I'm going to go into modules and I'll show you what the module looks like. So I picked this is a good troubleshooting moment. So I picked an older version of a plugin that has not been updated recently. So because of that, Omega S is what I installed. It's using version 4.0.1. But the module and plugin requirements require a lower version of Omega to be able to install. And so I personally don't like the way that that kind of error comes up because I've had people before get confused. And because if you look back at that error, where it says it requires version three, it looks like it's indicating that it requires at least version three. Yeah, that's true. Really confused because they think, well, you know, I'm above version three, so this should work. But that's really not what it's saying. It's saying that it requires that version. And that's no higher. Right? Yes, either lower than the version 3.0.0 or lower than that version. So I will grab a different one, probably one from 2023. So I'll just use this access resource one. And that's a good tip to look at the updated date on each plugin. Because if it's updated around the time that you're updating the Omega version, that is a good tell that it is ready to go or closer to the version and compatible. And that point. So I'm going to upload access resource. And this is all it's also really kind of handy to like pay attention to what the dates mean. Also when we're working with PHP 2. That's a whole other conversation we could have. But I've always found that the date correlates to PHP compatibility as we're moving through different versions there. So I'm extracting the new plugin on that side. And we have the file open. And then I'll just give this page a refresh. And you can see I have a green light to install the plugin on that end. From here. And so then there's just some additional configuration needed sometimes on those plugins there. I have a question. Yes. If you go back to the dashboard for Omega. You were able to click into the site section and control the theme for a particular site. Right from there. But I don't see light and there's like a section that says theme, but I don't see a section that says modules that specific to that site deep. Can you only install modules that are network wide? Or can you? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that would be network wide across all sites. With Omega S for my understanding of it is that there is the one hub URL, but then you were able to designate one site as like the homepage. So folks can be redirected automatically to like a front page. And then at that point, once the other sites are worked on, you can change the theme in particular for those pages are for those sites. But the modules are going to be available to all all sites within the network. You can't specify specific specific ones on that side. And probably the same thing for themes in terms of availability. Yeah. But you can activate whichever theme you're looking for specifically on on a site. Yeah, absolutely on the on that side. So that also brings me to a cool trick with with the HT access file within Omega S. If you want it to be a particular site that you're working with. So if I go to the homepage here into sites and view the test URL, you'll see at the top it goes to my domain name education slash S. So that shows that's where all of the like application files of Omega live. But if you go to just education on the main domain, it's going to bring up a list of all sites. So a lot of times, admins will create a homepage site, and then redirect all traffic to Merida fear.com slash education to the home site. That is done through a redirect within cPanel. So you would set up whichever URL you wanted to wanted the homepage site to be within Omega S. And set and configure that. And then once that's configured, you want to go into the HT access file itself. And cPanel automatically drops the redirect rule at the bottom of the file for the HT access. So you want to move it all the way up to the top and click save so that the the server sees the redirect when loading the site first. And then it just automatically processes to the to the homepage site itself. So I found that that really helps with site management on that side. From there. And then another thing to look at is just the core files for Omega and or Omega S in particular. And that is anything that's not modules, themes, or the config file. Yeah, the config modules and themes are all dynamic and are specific to your particular application. The config folder holds the database credentials that are needed to connect the files to the database within the site. And then obviously modules and themes, as well as files, I did not include that in my last list files. So if you have any images or media embedded in your items or collections within Omega, you want to make sure to save those. So if you do have to update manually, I just grab a like select each folder, and then compress them into a zip drive, like a zip archive, and then update the application manually if I need to. And once the application is updated, you just extract the folders back out into the system and it'll override the default into what you've you've set up on that side. So that was the way around moving things as well before the cloning feature fixed was fixed with the installer. So we've got those demos there. So let's go back to our slides and see what we're looking at from here. So we've got the cloning. We talked about the plugins and themes as well. So just a reminder to download the full zip of those plugins to move over to the file system and then extract within the plugins or the themes folder modules or themes folders for Omega S in particular and then be mindful that these are all going to be manual going forward. There's no automatic updates for plugins and themes within the Omega, the Omega sphere on that side from there. So we did briefly mention this too. But when you're working with Omega, we definitely recommend working with subdomains, particularly if you're working with multiple applications on your account. So if you're working with WordPress over top, I have an example site that's actually that that works through this. So that's pretty, pretty interesting to see that you can do like, like WordPress is like a landing page, and then move into like Omega on a subdomain on that side. This helps with any HD access rules, or permissions and that sort of thing. So we want to make sure subdomains are utilized wherever possible. For those for more stability there and Omega S will default to sub folders, and that's totally fine. So if you wanted to work on a project on a subdomain, that's Omega S, it would be like, Omega S dot mario fear.com slash S slash site. That's totally fine because it's within that one folder. So no need to worry about sub folders, or subdomain changes there. So and that's actually not a feature within Omega S, you can't change the directory route, like how you could in a multi site, or press multi site, you could you could change it from a sub folder to a subdomain install, it's only sub folders within Omega S, right from there. Awesome. Okay, so now we are going to move into some examples. I've got a couple for each, Omega S and Omega Classic here. And these are all across reclaim from shared hosting to domain of one's own, and even reclaimed cloud to we have a project that's working in reclaimed cloud. So it's kind of cool to see I know this is install a trunk focused, but with reclaimed cloud, it's really cool as examples. So to start, we've got the cork LGBT archive, which showcases the history of the LGBT community within the within Ireland, and in cork specifically. And I learned that this is actually the second largest community in Ireland, which is really, which is really cool to see. So I've got the site here, let me switch my screen share. So we've worked with I've worked with Orla and some of the support tickets that that they've submitted and to see the site kind of grow in the way that it has has been really cool. They have a lot of items, which showcase particular media items from from videos to pamphlets and flyers to particular items themselves. So pictures of the items and then organized into collections from from books to alliances to photography as well to kind of showcase the different events throughout the the community. So like even the gay sweatshop in 1980, which was a play. And in a London, London based group performing in cork, which is really cool from there. So exhibits and collections are a little a little bit the same that you can kind of compile different items into different topics. So in the same way, like a category would be categories or tags on that side. So that's really, really cool. So you can see that this is the exhibit itself that piles four items into an exhibit there on that side. So then this links out to some other other folks in the community, which is super cool. Next is making modern America. This is a domain of one zone in particular project, working on the Great Depression. And I thought this was really cool because this is a great example of a class project working together to build out a particular site about a specific topic. This could be all this is also a good example of how omega s can be created, or be incorporated to I believe this was built before omega s was a was an application. So this was a class research project that dove into the 1930s and the American world after the Great Depression, which is really interesting. So they showcase like lesson plans. Here, you can see like different PDFs of that great example of like how you're able to embed different media types into the application. Yeah, I really like how, how different these two projects are in terms of both kind of dealing with history, but one is dealing with a kind of an evolving history. I imagine whereas for the cork community, you have that balance of something that is archived, something that's historical, but also like what's developing as well. Whereas this is a great example of something that is kind of a fully cohesive and wrapped up package of a snapshot of the past. Yeah, absolutely. I definitely like that and like how they both incorporate different media options within each. So this site in particular works with Neatline as well to create a map to show to show how Oklahoma looked in particular during the 1930s there, which is I think really cool on that side. Next is Georgetown slavery. This is the one that I was talking about that uses WordPress over top and then Omega to kind of showcase the different events. And this is a important website that showcases the the history of slavery with the George with Georgetown University and their interactions with with that and how they're reconciling it today as well, which is really interesting to kind of take a look through and understand how it was incorporated into the university at the time and then how they've evolved how they've evolved from that. And here is the WordPress site itself. So this is the landing page on the main Georgetown.edu website and it shows different page kind of talking about the project itself. And then the history quick link. No, that's different. It's a little bit of a way to get into it. So I got to look at the history and then I had it promise the Georgetown slavery archive. So the archive is the Omega site that showcases the different events of the of slavery within Georgetown. So this uses even a different theme than the other sites too. So this was particularly built in a mecha classic. Yeah, so I definitely recommend to read through if you are interested in the site, it was kind of interesting for me to read through to see how like how it was built and even just understanding the whole the whole project in general. There and then moving on to a mecha as examples, particularly within this Mount Sinai archive, which is an interesting collection of items from a monastery in Michigan from here. So we've got this one in particular works on recline cloud and is a project between Princeton University, Michigan and Tufts University. And this one is cool because it works with Amazon web services s3 storage. So if you find that your your site is taking up a lot of space because media files tend to do so with photos and videos, they just hold a lot of data. You can incorporate s3 within your mecha site, which I think is really cool. So you can offload the storage there and then continue to build your site on recline hosting and manage manage the core of the site from there. So that's really helpful. So this is I believe they have each site built into like the icons, manuscripts, and liturgical objects between. So that's really helpful. You can see all these different, these different pictures from there, which is super cool. And then finally, we've got another slavery project built in omega s through the on these ground project. It's a melon melon grant funded project across the country. But this one in particular is built from the University of Georgia. So that's that's really cool to see as well. So you can look at different organizations and resources as well. Cool. Alright, so that's on these grounds. I'll post like stall these websites in the chat as well. And that is all I've had for resources. Let us know we'll be in the discord chat to if you have any questions throughout this, definitely let us know we can we can chat through those on that side. But yeah, that's that's omega and omega s from here. And then that show a little splashed into omega and omega s. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Well, thank you all so much for joining. And we are looking forward to next week. And seeing what what applications we're working with it. Yeah, join us next week for scalar. So scalar. Yes. We were talking about the other the other applications. So I was not sure which portion of the timeline we were in that side. So we'll be looking at scalar and that's also going to be a really cool one. I'm excited to to see that as well. For sure. Awesome. Thanks, everyone. Yeah. See you next time. See ya