Blimey, you turn your back for five minutes and a thread the size of the BM
explodes on the MCG... :-)
Brilliant posts - thanks everyone. Couple of misc thoughts:
> The thing that always seems to be missing in CMS conversations (or
represented far too low down in order of importance) is usability. And by
that I mean usability for the editors, not the front-end. One of the whole
points about CMS is to enable non-technical people to edit content, and yet
it is here for these non-technical types that many CMS's fail..
> The perennially awful thing about almost all of them is the rich text
editing. I found it totally astounding for example that Sitecore -
the incumbent CMS at NMSI - has a mindblowingly flexible API that do and
talk to pretty much anything. Try and actually *edit* some text or *gasp*
paste from Word? Result: horrible markup and frustrated users...
> The reasons for choosing O/S are as much about the community that sit
around the product as anything else. Wordpress is a blinding platform
because you can always find answers to questions. The community is enormous,
and growing. This isn't me saying WP is the right platform for museum sites
(although I think WP is a damn good answer for many sites *up to a certain
scale*) - but that the "bespoke vs open" thing isn't just about the
licensing.
> I don't think Drupal can ever be presented as a "plug and play" solution
:-)
Personally I think Nick and Danny nailed it - there is no single solution,
and the best response to this is surely building plugins, modules and
connectors.
Thinking that I might put together a "Wordpress for Culture" hackday....
Anyone in?
Mike
_____________________________
*Mike Ellis *
I've gone freelance! Find out more about our new digital agency:
http://thirty8.co.uk
...and I wrote a book - all about digital heritage strategy:
http://heritageweb.co.uk
On Wed, Aug 17, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Cristiano Bianchi | Keepthinking <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Or maybe to have one system that does it all, in terms of (extended)
> content management.
>
> Website, collection (both internal information, the 'real; collection
> management, as well as the web display of collections), exhibition and
> events. And everything else that a museum or gallery needs. Plus the shop
> (e-commerce for tickets, donations, merchandise, membership, etc), all
> integrated into one, single database, and managed using one integrated, web
> based software. With no compromises in terms of quantity and quality of
> meta-data you can have, flexibility to adapt to individual and changing
> needs, access to external resources and vocabularies (e.g. Getty), mapping
> to ontologies (e.g. CIDOC-CRM, Lido or Dublin Core), integrated rights and
> digital asset management (local as well as online), production of reports in
> PDF as well as XML, APIs (that can easily This would cover most of the
> needs of any small of large museum, leaving out (thanks to Nick Poole for
> his excellent analysis):
>
> - School Group Bookings Systems
> - Office/productivity systems (including Contacts systems)
> - Customer Relationship Management Systems
>
> The problem we have with Drupal and the likes is that… we already have such
> a system, which has been built from scratch over the last ten years
> following our work with museums and galleries. In time (next year) will
> integrate what is outstanding. Should that system be open source? It can be,
> if we find a compelling reason for it: in any case we do not charge a
> license fee for it, only implementation (i.e. we do not make money from
> selling it, at this stage).
>
> And regarding what Tim Trent said:
>
> > I think the most important WCMS element is WYSIWYG.
>
> With similar vigour I would say this is not what's important, quite the
> opposite. What you get depends on where you get it and when you get it and
> changes all the time, with new browsers, new technologies, new platforms.
> Stick to WYSIWYG and your content is out-of-date as soon as you have created
> it. What you want to see is the web of logical connections between content
> objects, the network of relationships that define meaning for content
> according to contextual environments, in an abstract way. This goes back to
> the point I was trying to make earlier: content is one thing and
> presentation another. They should talk to each other as little as possible.
>
> Best, Cristiano
>
>
>
> > I think the difficulty comes when you want to use a Content management
> system (like Drupal and WordPress) to exhibit collections.
> > Then the webCMS has to have many of the attributes of a musCMS.
> >
> > I think the answer, as has been suggested, is a three part system.
> > * Collections management
> > * Exhibition Data management
> > * Presentation system (web or otherwise)
> >
> > I think I now understand the original question to relate to the
> specification of a presentation system for web use that would integrate
> exhibition data with the other important elements of museum website.
> >
> > However, it seems to me that the missing part that needs to be built, is
> something that can import data from a wide variety of collections management
> systems and export it for use in a wide variety of off the shelf open source
> Content Management Systems?
> >
> > e.g. Import objects, output articles (with rich metadata)
>
>
> --
>
> Cristiano Bianchi
> Keepthinking
>
> 43 Clerkenwell Road
> London EC1M 5RS
>
> t. +44 20 7490 5337
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> m. +39 329 533 4469 (it)
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