Tainacan
Tainacan
Description
Tainacan is an open-source repository platform that turns WordPress into a powerful and flexible environment for managing and publishing digital collections — as easily as writing a blog post.
Designed for cultural institutions, research projects, archives, museums, and any kind of digital collection, Tainacan integrates seamlessly with the WordPress block editor and takes full advantage of its ecosystem.
Key Features:
- Free and open source – Licensed under GPLv3: use, modify, and share freely
- WordPress based – Built to last taking advantage of the power of the WordPress ecosystem and features
- Compatible with any theme – Use the Tainacan Interface theme or adapt any WordPress theme
- Easy management – Create collections, define metadata, manage users, and publish content effortlessly
- Highly customizable – Configure metadata, taxonomies, and filters to match your project’s needs
- Faceted search – Offer advanced browsing with intuitive custom filters
- Importing and exporting – Import bulk data from spreadsheets, export in CSV, XLSX, JSON, and other formats
- API and interoperability – Complete RESTful API with support for metadata mapping to standards such as Dublin Core
- Gutenberg blocks – Tell stories about your digital archive using a variety of blocks anywhere in your site
Support
Need help?
Find documentation, community support, and development resources at:
- Website: https://tainacan.org/
- Documentation Wiki: https://wiki.tainacan.org/
- GitHub: https://github.com/tainacan/tainacan
- User Forum: https://tainacan.discourse.group/
Installation
- Upload the
tainacanfolder to the/wp-content/plugins/directory - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
- You will see a new menu item called “Tainacan” in your admin panel
- Click on it to open the Tainacan admin interface and start creating your collections
Requirements:
- WordPress 5.9 or higher
- PHP 7.0 or higher
- For automatic PDF thumbnail generation, Imagick is recommended (but not required)
Screenshots

Manage your repository

Set up your collection

Choose the metadata and filters for your collection

Add items described by your metadata

Set up your item as a file, link or text and attach many types of documents

Browse your collections with a faceted search interface

Navigate through the rich filtering interface

Explore more with Advanced Search

Set up Taxonomies to be used across your repository

Bulk edit as many items as you need quickly

Expose your collection using Tainacan default theme

Use Gutenberg blocks to display your collections in posts and pages

Choose which items will be displayed in your block

Items displayed using a Gutenberg block
Faq
After installation, click on the “Tainacan” menu item in your WordPress admin panel. You can create your first collection by clicking “New Collection”, configure its metadata and filters, and start adding items to your collection.
For an overview of the main concepts, visit our documentation.
Yes! Tainacan works with any WordPress theme, but developers can improve their integration. If you want more dedicated page templates we recommend using the Tainacan Interface theme, which is our classic theme that meets the demands of most collections. But you can also try using an FSE theme such as Tainá, or install an integration plugin for a popular theme such as Blocksy.
Visit https://your-site/collections to see the list of your collections. You can also add links to the collections in your menu by editing it and enabling “Collections” in the Screen options.
Yes! Tainacan supports importing bulk data from CSV spreadsheets. You can also use bulk editing tools to perform adaptations from your system modeling to the one you created in Tainacan.
Yes! Tainacan implements a complete RESTful API (read and write) that allows other applications to interact with your repository. You can expose your collection in different formats such as JSON, CSV, and HTML.
Tainacan allows you to define your own metadata standards by adopting a variety of types (text, relationship, numeric, date, geocoordinate etc.), but also supports predefined ones including Dublin Core and INBCM. Even when creating your own, you can still define mappers to other standards, allowing you to export to other systems.
Taxonomies in Tainacan are vocabularies that can be used across all your collections. You can configure taxonomy metadata with a set of hierarchical terms of your own vocabulary. This allows you to create controlled vocabularies that can be reused throughout your repository, ensuring consistency across different collections.
Tainacan offers several Gutenberg blocks so you can present your collections in many different ways! You can display items, collections, search interfaces, and more. Simply add the blocks to your posts and pages through the WordPress block editor.
We take security very seriously. Please report any security bugs found in the source code of the Tainacan plugin through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program. The Patchstack team will assist you with verification, CVE assignment, and notify the developers of this plugin.
After site migration, plugin updates, or new installations, you may need to rebuild WordPress permalinks. If collections or pages are returning 404 errors despite already having items on it, go to Settings -> Permalinks in your WordPress admin panel, ensure “Post Name” or a Custom Structure with /%postname%/ is selected, then click Save Changes (even if nothing changed). This will rebuild the permalink structure.
Reviews
Great plugin for libraries and cultural institutions
By jorgemet on March 10, 2025
Arguably the best WordPress plugin for digital collections of libraries and cultural institutions. I have successfully implemented it for several repository projects in Uruguay.
Perfect plugin!
By Yura Shkoda (yurashkoda) on January 21, 2023
Now I have a repository with no "server headaches" like with Dspace, for example, and near the same functionality. I think this beautiful plugin opens a future for the digital repositories, at least for my library. Thank you!
Moderne, bien conçu et facile d'accès
By yblatti on January 17, 2023
Parfait pour inventorier, documenter et surtout présenter vos collection d’objets et d'images.
D'une petite association historique à un grand musée, tout le monde trouve son usage <3
Referência em software de criação e gestão de repositórios digitais
By Suelane Silva Ramos (suelanesilva) on November 29, 2022
Recommended
By leemon on July 3, 2022
Interest of Tainacan
By MonsieurNuages on May 28, 2021
Great plugin for archives and collections
By frdabd on April 24, 2020
Solução para repositórios digitais
By rooseweltl on April 18, 2020
Ótima ferramenta multifuncional!
By gabrielcperrone on August 1, 2019
Ótimo Plugin - equipe nota 10
By marcosfbrumlopes on July 31, 2019
Changelog
To see the changelog, please visit the GitHub Releases page.