OembedImport plugin

[Stephen Ball]

Hi everyone,

At the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill we're experimenting with
using Omeka to manage our digital exhibits. Our digital collections
are housed in CONTENTdm but we want to easily be able to pull selected
images into Omeka for exhibits. Since I'd already added oembed support
to our CONTENTdm installation, I figured the easiest thing to do would
be to add a plugin for importing items from an oembed-compatible URL.

Installing the plugin will add a new tab to the admin navigation:
"Oembed Import"

In that tab, just paste an oembed URL into the "Item URL" field and
optionally select an item type and collection. The plugin will try to
match the URL against a set of whitelists to find a matching oembed
api default to oohembed if a match isn't found. The API is then called
with the URL and the result parsed into an omeka item and file.

The whitelists are managed in a sub-tab in the Oembed Import view. Two
are setup when the plugin is installed: dc.lib.unc.edu and flickr.com.

tl;dr: install the plugin, click the "Oembed Import" tab in admin,
paste a flickr photo url into the "item url" field and click "import
item"

The plugin does what we need it to. We can just copy the URL for a
CONTENTdm item we want to add to an exhibit, paste it into the oembed
importer, and get an item with the image and starting metadata pulled
right in.

The plugin code could certainly use some examination. I suspect a lot
of the complexity could be moved into a model, but I'm not familiar
with Zend and couldn't find a good starting point for creating that
aspect.

Background information:

http://www.oembed.com/

http://oohembed.com/