In theory there's no reason why you should use wordpress to build touch
screen gallery exhibits.
If you've already got the wordpress skills and you're not too ambitious
about what you want to achieve then its got good CMS and data and
customising capabilities.
There are technical bits that touchscreen type exhibits have which you'll
probably need to program from scratch using Javascript. For example, most
touchscreen exhibits have a timeout which checks to see if the exhibit has
been touched in the last minute and, if not resets the exhibit.
For a full description of this kind of thing try the Science Museum's
"Requirements for all museum computer exhibits"
http://www.joecutting.com/softwarerequirements.php
The requirement for always on networking would be a problem if you're
operating in an unstaffed environment. My ISP shut down for an hour this
morning so I don't think we're at 100% network reliability just yet -
wireless is even less reliable. It only takes one electric drill to
interfere with it. Remember we're talking about a touchscreen exhibit so
people won't know to just hit the "refresh" button if the page doesn't
load. If you do need a network connection the most important thing is that
the system can gracefully recover from a network failure without needing
someone to come and reset it.
The other big issue you've probably already considered is that the typical
wordpress blogging model doesn't usually make much sense in a gallery
environment. People tend to only visit the gallery once and then only spend
3-5 minutes at a terminal so they're much more in interested in seeing the
most interesting or entertaining content straight away rather than browsing
a list of articles over time.
I don't want to sound overly negative - in the long term I reckon lots of
gallery exhibits will be build with HTML5 but there *are* lots of picky
details to building gallery kiosks which can come back and bite you if
you're not ready for them.
Cheers
Joe
--
Joe Cutting - Digital Exhibits
@joe_cutting
www.joecutting.com
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