Diviner Archive

Description

DIVINER is a free and open-source WordPress plugin for small to mid-size institutions with public archiving needs. DIVINER 1.0 is a digital platform built for archiving, organizing, and presenting large amounts of photographs, audio, video, and documents – or all four! DIVINER might be right for your organization if you have a collection of humanities materials you would like to share with the public (for example, a collection of 3,000 photographs of a large farm in the early 1900s; or thousands of audio clips and interviews related to immigration in Wisconsin).

This plugin creates a new Archive Item content type with an admin interface for adding meta fields. The fields can be of several different flavors: Text, Date, Advanced Detail Field, Taxonomy, and Select. During the initial setup you set up these fields and config them. Once setup is complete you can start adding archive items as documents, photos, videos, audio, or mixed format with all your intended meta information. Each archive item single page displays the main media elements before the content and then all the meta field data after the content.

The plugin also provides a shortcode ([diviner_browse_page]) which can be added to any page and which generates a responsive real time multifacet search experience for exploring your archive. This Browse experience includes a search bar, and sorting options, as well as search facets per each field. Search returns are updated in real time and appear in a paginated grid.

To improve performance, this plugin is designed to work well with the ElasticPress plugin.

Find out if Diviner is right for your project and access detailed installation instructions at https://ncpr.github.io/diviner-wp-archive-theme/.

Screenshots

Installation

1) Download and activate plugin.
2) Go to Diviner General Settings to add permissions statement to the bottom all archive Items
3) Go to Diviner Manager Fields to set up meta fields to be associated with your archive items (ex: Photographer Name)
4) Create Archive Items
5) Navigate to the your archive items and view the meta fields and feature media (image, audio, video, document)

View detailed installation instructions on the project website

FAQ

Why use a Text field?

Use text fields for information you wish to assign to each archive item. Example: serial number, catalog number, internal title, secondary description etc.

Why use a Date field?

Use a date field if you would like your audience to be able to filter by a date range, by year, decade, or by century. Ex: if you want to sort a collection of a thousand photos from the 20th century into decades.

Why use a Select field?

Use a select field to assign a piece of information that comes from a very small list of pre-set choices to each of your archive item. Examples: Art Format, with the choices being Painting, Sculpture, or Digital.

Why use a Advanced Detail field?

For categories with many choices (20+) and which you would like to be able to elaborate on and attach auxiliary information, use the Advanced Detail Field. A good example would be if you wished to sort your materials by their creator (photographer, author, etc.) – for each creator, this type of field allows you to create an “entry” for that creator. Other examples: donor, institution. Internally, this field manages what is typically called a custom post type in wordpress vernacular.

Why use a Taxonomy field?

Use a taxonomy field for categories you want to sort your materials by (ex: by location, such as by county, by neighborhood, or by room in a museum). You will have to create the choices in this category (ex: by county; Clinton, Essex, Warren, and Jefferson). Taxonomy fields are best suited to a category with fewer than twenty choices, which do not need further explanation to a viewer.

What is this modal window in browse experience

If you check this box in the general settings, a small window appears when you click on the archive item thumbnail in the search return grid. This window provides an initial summary of the archive item details.

What is the permissions statement

This will appear at the bottom of each Archive Item single page. This field is intended to provide some basic information of the copyright and permissions regarding the media in your archive.

How do I customize the display?

There are several filters for outputting the content. They are diviner_render_document_download, diviner_render_video_oembed, diviner_render_photo, diviner_render_audio, and diviner_render_audio_oembed

How is the data maintained in the backend?

All field data is kept in the post meta table. Archive Single data is a custom post type.

Reviews

Not displaying the items before the search

eightsix May 16, 2020

I tested this plugin for our website. It seems easy and practical. However, I would have liked it to NOT show any items before the search. If not mistaken, this option does not exist. Also, I could not find the way to deactivated the roll-down menu for the date and other searches, so to have only the text search. Also, I could not change the text in the search field (which is strange, because that option seems to exist but did not work). It does what it is meant for, but a little more flexibility would make it an absolute “must have”. —- As a side note, which did not weigh on my rating: we wanted to use this plugin for displaying certificate of analysis reports. The customer enter the batch number in the search. If there is match, the CofA is displayed. If not, nothing is displayed (customers do not need to see all CofA, only the one for their batch). If could do that by modifying a bit your plugin, I would certainly rate it 10 stars! Thank you for providing such a nice plugin. Good job!

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

0.5.2

Fix to shortcode output

0.5.1

• Select Field
• Taxonomy Field
• Custom Post Type Field
• Date Field
• Shortcode for browse experience with multifaceted search

0.5

First release