Student Website Hosting: CSUSM History Master's Program

In partnership with the CSUSM History Department, the Library Technology Initiatives and Development (LTID) department is providing History Master's degree students with access to the Omeka and Wordpress content management platforms. You may use these web-based applications to create websites to support your final thesis projects.

Below you will find information on contract agreement, support from LTID, best practices, resources, and a list of all current Omeka Classic, Omeka S, and WordPress history student websites. 

Getting Started

  • Please use the form located at Website Request Form for History Master's Students to request the creation of either an Omeka or Wordpress site.
  • LTID will provision your site within 3 business days and provide you with information on accessing your new site.
  • It is your responsibility to learn how to use the system that you have selected. LTID does not provide website customization, content editing support, website design, or training on the use of either system.
    Omeka S User Manual
    First Steps with WordPress

Best practices and your responsibilities as a site owner

  • Please be aware that network disruptions or unexpected system outages may result in loss of work. We recommend regularly saving your work
    • Omeka does not offer an autosave feature at this time. If you are working on a longer document for Omeka, we recommend drafting it in Google Docs or a similar text editor.
    • Wordpress will autosave a draft every minute.
  • If you perform a password reset, please adhere to campus requirements for valid passwords. This information is available on IITS Username & Password/Passphrase reset, under the "What Makes a Valid Password?" section.
  • Creating accessible content is your responsibility. There are a number of resources on campus and on the web that can help you this important aspect of publishing content on the web.
    General Design - guidelines provided by CSUSM IITS
    Introduction to Web Accessibility - W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)

What you can expect from LTID Support

Site Availability and Backups

  • LTID is committed to providing the highest possible availability for all systems. In addition, each site is securely backed up on a regular schedule and backups are retained for an extended period of time.
  • In the event of a site outage, LTID will ensure that your site is restored to service as quickly as possible.
  • LTID employs the same server data center, system monitoring, and backup processes as used by IITS.
  • LTID is not able to support the retrieval of content lost due to network disruption, computer crashes, or other computing problems. LTID will perform a full site restore only in the event of a problem with a campus webserver or database system.

Security

  • LTID will upgrade as soon as possible the Omeka and Wordpress core system and installed addons when security updates are available.
  • Upgrades that provide feature improvements will also be applied but at a lower priority.
  • Network and system security is managed by IITS.

Addons for Omeka and WordPress

  • LTID will install a number of Omeka addons that you are free to activate for your site.
  • You may request the installation of additional Wordpress addons. We will make every effort to fulfill your request. However, LTID reserves the right to deny requests (we will provide an explanation ?).
    • LTID will not accept any requests that install additional software to our webservers.

LTID Plugin recommendations

  • Timeline plugins:
  • Mapping plugins:
    • We recommend Geolocation plugin for Omeka Classic: Geolocation
    • For WordPress, we don't recommend the Mapping plugins available at this time. We recommend adding the QGIS files to the server and creating an iframe within your website. This process can take up to three days to develop. So please get in touch with LTID as soon as possible to access SharePoint to add your files. 

LTID Support Portal

 

 

Useful Links for Students