When the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities introduced Curatescape to the public in the early 2010s, the web was a very different place. Omeka, the platform upon which Curatescape is built, was still a version 1.x product. Most websites were still designed for desktop monitors. Fewer than half of US adults owned a smartphone. The ensuing years brought rapid technical change. We think we did a good job of keeping up. But we always felt that the developer experience – and the codebase, built in fits and starts to accommodate ever-evolving needs – could be improved. In Summer 2025, we began working on a major rewrite, dubbing the project Curatescape Core.
The goal of Curatescape Core was to take the existing functionality – spread across 4 required plugins and 1 required theme (of which there were 2 distinct variants) – and create a single core plugin that would be easily discovered, deployed, and updated, and would work with any Omeka theme, functioning gracefully alongside other plugins and other philosophies for content development. The bulk of the work took about 7 months, with several additional months dedicated to testing, refinement, and a slow rollout to existing Curatescape partner projects. The resulting work was made available in March 2026 and added to the Omeka plugin repository shortly thereafter.
Curatescape Stories & Tours
Curatescape Stories & Tours is the primary Curatescape plugin. It contains all the functionality required to create and manage location-based stories, tours, and maps and to send that data to Curatescape mobile apps.
Stories
Curatescape has always been focused on storytelling. The Curatescape Stories & Tours plugin adds the Curatescape Story item type and the metadata elements that make up the Curatescape schema (incl. fields like Subtitle, Lede, Factoids, Street Address, and more). Unlike earlier iterations where all item content needed to use the Curatescape Story item type, all other item types are now supported.
Tours
Tour-building functionality is built into the Curatescape Stories & Tours plugin, with performance optimizations, additional display configurations, and a new in-tour floating navigation bar. If you haven’t already discovered the options for customizing the subtitle and snippet text for each tour item, now is a great time to update your existing tours.
Maps
We formalized our longstanding dependence on the first-party Geolocation plugin for entry and storage of location data (install and activate Geolocation before installing Curatescape). Curatescape Stories & Tours allows users to display the default Geolocation maps or our own, which bring some additional perks such as filtering map views using Subject terms, switching between custom base maps, customizing map markers, and much more. By moving map functionality out of themes and into the core plugin, we’re much better equipped to adapt and evolve alongside the Geolocation plugin (for example, we’re already prepared to support multiple locations per item and other unreleased features scheduled to arrive with Geolocation version 4.0).
…And More
There are tons of new features and settings to help ensure a seamless design, admin, and editorial experience, including control over template overrides, block placement, content filtering, admin form options, performance optimizations, and a new dashboard that analyzes your content and provides suggestions for improvement. Upon installing the Curatescape Stories & Tours plugin, you’ll want to carefully review the settings page to get a sense of what is possible. Advanced users may want to return periodically to make tweaks, while less experienced users can happily use the thoughtfully chosen defaults. Technical and non-technical users alike should review the plugin documentation for more details.
Other Developments
The Curatescape SEO plugin is optional but strongly recommended for all Omeka projects, especially ones using Curatescape. We spun this out into its own plugin so that it could be used by non-Curatescape projects as well. It adds enhanced meta tags and thumbnails for improved search engine optimization and social media sharing. It is compatible with all Omeka Classic themes and supports Curatescape content as well as standard Omeka Items and Collections, Exhibit Builder content, and Simple Pages content. Set it and forget it.
Curatescape Galleries is another plugin that we spun out of the core because we thought it might be broadly useful to the community. Its utility is mainly for simpler themes that don’t already have a complex feature set for displaying media files. Users can choose various methods for displaying media files, including simple tables, responsive grids, slideshows, and more. It’s compatible with most – but not all – themes.
The recommended Curatescape Echo theme has been updated. Not only is it fully compatible with the Curatescape Stories & Tours plugin, it’s also been refactored to better support non-Curatescape content.
Finally, many of our longtime partner projects have continued using the older Curatescape Classic theme, which has been fully updated for compatibility with Curatescape Stories & Tours, and also received a very light refresh.
Whether you are an open source user of Curatescape’s web tools or a project partner deploying Curatescape mobile apps for iOS, iPadOS, and Android devices, these changes should enhance and streamline your projects. If you have questions about the upgrade process, have additional feature requests, or have any other feedback, let us know on the Curatescape user forum. To get started with a new project, head over to the contact page.