I have been working on a couple of Omeka sites this semester. I really like the Omeka system for its handling of meta data and the Neatline map extension for easy map creation. Omeka S just came out and looks fantastic, though I haven’t had a chance to build with it yet.
However, I do not like the Omeka themes. For a while I was using Denison as seen here. However, the theme mishandles the four images on the front page and the drop down menu has a tendency to malfunction.
I also tried Big Picture but abandoned it when I was unable to merge the beautiful Browse Collections page into the index page.
Ultimately I turned away from Omeka themes and instead used HTML5Up templates. I transitioned Dr. Daniela Busiciglio’s site that had been built with Denison from this:
to this (progettovitaliano.org):
I’ve just finished transitioning another site that I built with Dr. Mirelsie Velazquez and her students from the Big Picture Omeka theme to this (http://docnarr.oucreate.com/):
Because Omeka’s API does not provide images, I was not able to load the images into these HTML based pages programmatically. Thus, these front pages will require a bit more maintenance in their HTML code than Omeka themes, which are controlled from the administrative GUI. However, I really like the flexibility that I get from stripping out the front page of the Omeka themes and replacing it with something that I can tweak to feature the best parts of the projects.