Today we’re happy to announce Neatline 2.3! This release includes a couple of nifty new features and, under the hood, a pretty big stack of bug fixes, performance tweaks, and improvements to the development workflow. The coolest new feature in 2.3 is a simple little addition that we’ve gotten a number of requests for in the last few months - the ability to “hard link” to individual records inside of an exhibit. In the new version, when you select a record in an exhibit, a little fragment gets tacked on to the end of the URL that points back to that record. For example, if the record has an ID of 16, the URL will change to something like:
www.omeka-site.org/neatline/show/exhibit**#records/16**
Then, if someone goes directly to this URL, the exhibit will automatically select that record when the page loads, just as if the reader had manually clicked on it - the map will focus and zoom around the record, the popup bubble will appear, the timeline will scroll, and any other custom event bindings added by the exhibit’s theme will fire. This is nice because it makes it easier to use Neatline as a kind of geospatial “footnoting” system that can be referred to from external resources - sort of like the Neatline Text extension, except the text doesn’t have to be housed inside of Omeka. Imagine you’re working on an article that makes reference to some geographic locations, and you want to plot them out in Neatline. This way you could put the text of the article anywhere on the web (a Wordpress blog, an online journal, etc.) and just link to the relevant parts of the Neatline exhibit using plain old anchor tags.
For example, check out this simple little Neatline exhibit, which just plots out the locations of eight US cities. Then, click on these links to open up the same exhibit, this time focused on the individual cities: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, and (but of course) Charlottesville.
Check out the change log for the full list of updates in 2.3, and grab the new production package from the Omeka addons repository. Thanks Jenifer Bartle, Jacki Musacchio, Rachel King, Lincoln Mullen, and Miriam Posner for helping us find bugs and brainstorm about features! As always, drop a note on the GitHub issue tracker if you run into problems or have ideas for new features.