Creating Stories and Tours

Hello,

I am working on a trial website that develops stories/short essays around groups of photographs, and that maps these stories to locations in Russia and Central Asia.

I have been having trouble finding information about how to create stories and tours. The GitHub info isn’t always that helpful.

  1. Is there a way to add HTML when creating a tour? I need italics for titles, etc., and to add links for other pages, tours, etc.

  2. Is there a way to reorder the tours in Tours? And to reorder items, and separate the items that are curatescape stories, under Items?

  3. Why do various photos and pages appear under Stories on my website? I haven’t created (intentionally, at least) any stories

  4. Is it possible to add “Stories” to the menu on the left on the Dashboard?

  5. How do you add photos to a Curatescape story?

Are there recent how-to videos that might be helpful?

I am beginning to wonder if there is another theme that might work better.

This is our TRIAL website: https://www.curatescape.unhartsprojectspace.org/

Many thanks,

Sis

  1. You can add HTML manually (e.g. <em>Italic</em>) to the tour description text and the postscript text, but not the title.
  2. There is no built in way to reorder the tours or items. Regading separating the items by type, the theme is designed with the expectation that all items will use the Curatescape Story item type.
  3. The theme is designed with the expectation that all items will use the Curatescape Story item type, be more narrative than archival in nature, and that they will all be placed on the map.
  4. Story is just a label used for items on the frontend of the site. You can customize that label in theme settings.
  5. Photos for stories/items are added like any other Omeka site, i.e. using the Files tab in the admin item form. With the Curatescape theme, the first file is used in the header (and in other areas such as the map and browse pages) to represent the item. After adding files, you can edit the file metadata to create captions, etc.

Also, I noticed that your homepage is using a static Simple Page. If you want to use the theme’s default homepage design, you can change that up in your navigation settings. The homepage is fairly customizable so you might want to look over all the theme options to get a setup that works best for your project.

That could be. If your items don’t have a particularly strong tie to geographical place, or if they’re not primarily narrative-based, Curatescape might not be your best option. Sometimes a standard Omeka theme using the Exhibit Builder and/or Neatline plugins might be a better fit. Curatescape is really designed for a pretty specific use case.

Here’s some additional documentation:

Thank you so much for the information. I will look into this stuff more carefully tomorrow.

All best,

Sis