> Thinking that I might put together a "Wordpress for Culture"
hackday....
Anyone in?
Sounds good to me!
I completely agree on the point about the community aspect of WordPress
being a major advantage. My feeling is that museums could only benefit
from an eco-system on this kind of scale (even if it the platform may
never be considered to be "perfect", whatever that means).
I am also keen on developing stuff that others can use but in the spirit
of what I would like to achieve I know that I can't do this alone (my
developer skills are almost non-existent for starters).
Perry
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Mike Ellis
Sent: 18 August 2011 09:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: What would an open source museum CMS look like?
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
> m. +44 7939 041169 (uk)
> m. +39 329 533 4469 (it)
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
> ---
>
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>
>
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