Considering migrating a current Curatescape project over to Wordpress with PlacePress, which would make it easier to do some design/feature customization desired by our community partners while still maintaining the best features of Curatescape…
@ebell, as the creator of both, could you comment on any potential disadvantages to moving from Curatescape to PlacePress? (besides the fact that it seems like it will be a lot of tedious labor, but that’s just life…)
Trying to think through if anything is lost in terms of features or functionality. Thanks!
I think the disadvantage might be the loss of predictability and simplicity. PlacePress – like WordPress itself – is a lot more flexible. You can do more, but you also need to do more.
For instance, you can use any WordPress theme you like, but getting the most out of a WordPress theme requires a deeper understanding of all the configuration options, a solid sense of user interface conventions, and probably also requires a little bit of coding if you want to build around the core features of PlacePress. In thinking about selecting or creating a theme that works well with PlacePress, you might look at the designs for Green Book Cleveland and Queer Cleveland. The designs are similar. Both are adapted from the Underscores starter theme (which basically means they were designed from scratch) and use custom templates for the navigation, homepage, archives, and content pages, and also incorporate a custom icon set for their respective taxonomies (i.e. Location Types). This is not the only way to do things, but it might be useful to think through all the things you might need or want in a theme.
You might also find it difficult in WordPress to keep layouts and design consistent across posts – especially if you have multiple authors – since the block editor kind of lets you make anything look like anything (whereas Omeka just has you fill in forms without worrying too much about page design).
Those are just some issues that come to mind. Really, it depends on how comfortable you are with using and administering WordPress, compared to Omeka. Ultimately, PlacePress is not necessarily an out of the box solution, so I would generally suggest setting up a sandbox installation to test things out before making a decision.
Thanks, Erin - that’s very helpful. “You can do more, but you also need to do more” is a good way of summarizing it. And the point about layout/design consistency is a useful one, too. We will keep thinking through the options