Pico VS Omeka

I'm cooking up a really cheap publishing solution using Pico CMS ("stupidly simple") and rsync or something from my Obsidian Vault to my PHP server.

I'm using https://picocms.org/.

It is PHP based, works on a cheap limited web hoster.

The concept is: Upload a markdown file plus associated media, and it does the rest for you.

For customisation, you can use Twig and CSS, or a predefined theme (I didn't look into these, I wanted a custom appearance).

For feeds there are plugins, for comments I use a "mail me at [email protected]" approach.

I like PicoCMS a lot.

Have you tried Pico? No database required and. You can either use Markdown or plain text for posting. Each post is just a file... https://picocms.org/

Ever since version 2.0, Les Pas has been able to share albums with other Nextcloud users, you can even co-edit the same album with others if you publish the album as 'Joint Album'. But how about people not in your Nextcloud server, like those friends who attended your wedding? Create temporary guest accounts for them is just not feasible. Photo blog is here to help! And luckily, we have Pico, the stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS, which happens to have a very good Nextcloud [app]((https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/cms_pico), enable us to publish our own blogs.

You can try Pico CMS. But if you have the time, try Hugo. The latter has a learning curve, and the docs are frustratingly non-beginner friendly, but once you get the basics, there is no going back!

Pico

For a blog, Pico can do the trick, and it's really handy to use (it uses Twig as template engine that's one of the best part for me).

Omeka

Omeka (https://omeka.org/) is OSS and has a REST API. Usually used by museums/libraries, but primary function is to upload and describe media files.

Adding new features to listmonk (mailing list / newsletter manager), preparing for its next release.

https://github.com/knadh/listmonk

Setting up and playing around with Omeka, a brilliant document publishing system, to help publish an archive of digitised physical books and documents.

https://omeka.org

If you Google "COVID-19 digital archive" you can also find a range of projects with different focuses. A benefit of technology is that now many organizations can create their own Omeka site and build a collection to document events in real time. However, I hope the post above demonstrates that while anyone can, any historian utilizing these various resources need to consider the practices undertaken to gather digital archives. We would never enter a physical archive and look at paper documents without questioning why those survive, what's missing, and thinking about voices specifically left out. A digital collection is the same, however they present an abundance of sources that can distract or distort- approaching the surviving records of the Salem Witch Trials is different from approaching a collection of 40,000 personal accounts. What voices might not volunteer a personal account to a website if it requires identifying information? How many images of people in masks at the grocery store do we need to deliberately save? These are not substantially different questions from what past historians and archivists thought about, but technology does reframe discussion. We'll see how many of these projects were developed with sustainability in mind.

Yes to this and other free, open source solutions such as Omeka.

I have not tried this yet but: https://wordpress.org/plugins/diviner-archive/ Or you might look into a non-Wordpress solution like Omeka https://omeka.org/

There are some great visual archives online that might serve as inspiration. Free tools to create them include Collection Builder, Omeka, and some other free, open source repository software. Most of their sites have links to projects that people have built using their tool, and I find them super inspiring to scroll through and get ideas for projects like yours.

A popular alternative is Omeka, which can't directly be used with WordPress but does have some workarounds to effectively show the digital collection in a frame. Search the Omeka forum for more info.

Omeka (https://omeka.org/)