Hi Perry
Excellent debate!
You might be interested in a website that we recently completed for the
Museum of Design in Plastics, MoDiP, you can find it here:
http://www.modip.ac.uk/
The website uses a Drupal CMS.
This provides the staff at MoDiP with full control over the editorial
content; they can make pages, whole sections, edit menus, make side bar
blocks, upload and link to other files, do pretty much whatever they want.
We wrote a series of step-by-step illustrated guides to the various editing
functions in case they, or sometimes we, forget how the site works.
It has three sections: The Collection, Resources, Exhibitions & Events.
The latter two are where most of the routine content creation takes place,
while The Collection is where users can find information about the 10,000+
artefacts listed in the website.
The artefact data is drawn from a MODES collection management database, the
XML export from MODES is passed through an XSLT transform to remove
curatorial information not required on the public website.
There are also nine taxonomies which, along with the XML data export, are
pre-processed using a Perl script to provide the linked metadata which is
stored for each artefact. In addition, each artefact is tagged with the
relevant taxonomy terms.
The whole Collection sits on top of a SOLR search engine, which provides the
faceted search interface. This enables users to slice the data in different
ways and also resets the search when a user clicks on an artefact metadata
link.
This is taking way longer for me to describe than if you just have a go!
Oh, there is also a bit of Javascript used to load the artefact images
without needing to reload the whole page and it is used again on the home
page to randomly swap the featured image each time that page is loaded.
My point in writing this is to explain that, for us, having started making
bespoke websites back in the mid-90s using ASP and PHP, we then moved to
using the Plone open source framework for a few years and now use Drupal as
our CMS of choice when making websites.
It offers good CMS usability for the editors, more advanced featured for
those with a technical bent, excellent control of access permissions and the
option for us developers to customise the various plug-in modules to provide
added functionality.
In that sense, we find that Drupal offers a good framework in which to blend
out-of-the-box features and custom programming, an important balance and a
recurring feature of this correspondence.
I hope you find this helpful.
Cheers, Phil Blume
On 18 August 2011 12:08, James Grimster <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> thanks Bridget,
>
> not on holiday, at Welsh Archivists Forum
>
> we're running Black Country History http://blackcountryhistory.org and not
> BCLM (Tony Crockford's site)
>
> thus far:
>
> a; split all museum core data off somewhere else outside CMS and access via
> middleware / API. the simpler the API (like RSS) the more others use it
> (re. Jeremy and Nick's comments)
> b; a pluggable CMS with easy to understand hooks so that linking into (a)
> is easier, third party plugins work alongside without modifications; and
> that can be maintained by others when/if initial developer run over by a
> bus.
>
> we choose WP as it runs well multi-instance for the micro sites, has a lot
> of good (and not so good) community supported plugins and will scale to
> millions of hits per day.
>
> best
>
> --
> James
>
>
> On 17 Aug 2011, at 11:21, Bridget McKenzie wrote:
>
> > James Grimster from Orangeleaf would be much better speaking for himself,
> unless his quietness is because he's away somewhere nice on holiday, but you
> may know he's developed Collectionsbase on Wordpress.
>
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