How does the “Media Player” metadata field work in Curatescape?
In the menu it says “Embed a relevant piece of streaming media (Spotify, Youtube, etc.) here” but I can’t seem to get it to display media from any source. I’ve tried adding both embed codes and the URLs in this field - and I’ve made sure we have HTML filtering turned OFF, so that shouldn’t be interfering.
Am I doing something wrong?
I’m not sure where you’re finding a field called “Media Player.” Is that added by a plugin?
Hi Erin,
It’s in the Curatescape Story Item type metadata, at the very bottom. We don’t have any additional plugins on this installation - just the standard ones that are part of Curatescape.
That field must have been added manually. To my recollection, there has never been a “Media Player” element added by the Curatescape Admin Helper plugin (see documentation). It’s possible that we once experimented with something like that, but I don’t think so.
Thanks, and sorry for the confusion - I’ll check in with my co-admin to see if it’s something they added.
Following up on this: would there be a recommended element to use for embedding an iframe for audio or video not hosted directly on our site? It seems it can be displayed in the “Factoid” element, but that imposes some restrictions on the width of the iframe. I also attempted to post it in the “Related Resources” element, but that doesn’t display anything.
Also, it seems Curatescape suppresses manually-added elements, correct?
We do not support embedded content. But it can be done if you want to edit the core theme files and your site’s security settings.
Some fields strip out HTML formatting (to varying degrees, depending on the field). And more broadly, the site’s HTML Filtering settings come in to play on Simple Pages, theme settings, etc.
There are some reasons and rationale behind our decision not to support external/embedded media, to limit custom HTML, etc. For one, Omeka is not really designed with that use case in mind. Omeka expects all media to be attached to an item via the file upload process. Omeka also does not have a WYSIWYG editor (not in any meaningful way, at least compared to something like WordPress). So the theme design follows the broad patterns of content that the Omeka platform expects (with minimal customizations that we think make sense). This allows for full compatibility/portability between standard Omeka installations (i.e. those not using Curatescape), including via protocols like OAI-PMH, etc. Also, since Curatescape is designed to communicate with Android and iOS mobile apps, the content needs to be predictable (in terms of formatting and organization). Finally, this predictability allows us to create a distinct, custom appearance unlike the default Omeka themes (which are generic by design to allow for more flexibility, but that has its own drawbacks).
All that said, if you are hosting your own site, you can freely modify the themes and plugins to do whatever makes the most sense for your project. We just won’t necessarily be able to provide support for that process. There are innumerable ways to design a layout, add functionality, etc. so it will really be dependent upon your general web development skills.
We do not suppress manually-added elements so much as simply not include them. You can always edit the item template to add elements using the Omeka metadata() function.
