Taking stock

Published November 6, 2009 money , time Leave a Comment
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Ok, so we “did it”. Or at least, we did some of it…

Here’s what we did do in our allotted 12 hours (roughly in order…):

Technically (just to give you a reminder) we used a combination of WordPress MU for the bulk of the site and the really rather nice Omeka to hold the object data. Dan built a WordPress plugin which pulled the object data from Omeka’s alternative response formats and inserted it into our WP pages.

Prior to making the decision about which platform to use, we held our object data on Google Docs and used a simple web form to add stuff. Once we decided to use Omeka we used the CSV import plugin to get our data out of Google Docs.

Initially we were thinking we’d use Omeka on the front end too, and just re-skin it to look like the rest of our site (ie users would “silently jump” over to Omeka to look at collection items and then back again for “other” museum information. We realised pretty soon though that it’d be much better to not have essentially two sites to maintain and design so instead went for the WP front-end / embedded Omeka objects approach.

So what did we learn, and why…?

We set out with two main aims. Firstly, we wanted to show that it is possible to build (museum) websites quickly, using cheap or freely available tools and techniques. On the whole, we both feel we achieved this, managing to produce a site from scratch and get it live. This is not to say we’re 100% happy with the site we produced: both Dan and I wanted at least another couple of hours to tweak and fiddle; had we been building a museum website in a week, this would still have been the case (there is NEVER enough time, right?!) but still, 12 hours was a very, very tight timescale to set ourselves.

Clearly, many of issues raised via Twitter or on this blog remain for most “real” museums and we had a huge luxury in not having to deal with painfully slow signoff, huge stakeholder meetings, conflicting pressures and political tensions.

I guess the point we’d make in response to this is one that we have both made many times in the past: although no museum is every likely to (want to!) build a website in a day, there is a tendency for the timescales created by the political nature of museum decision-making to actively damage projects. The raw enthusiasm and energy that is created by doing things rapidly, cheaply and – frankly – without the polish of perfection – is hugely important to any project. A year-plus long timeline (some museum online projects I’ve worked on have been 3+ years in length!) will by default kill any passion and enthusiasm, and probably most of the members of the project team, too. Finding a middle ground where decisions can be made quickly and technologies like WordPress or Omeka are installed and configured easily; finding a framework where museums can play and experiment – this is clearly where success lies.

A couple of other people mentioned that the costs (currently, erm, £6.39!) are unrealistic and should include our time as well. This is probably right, depending on how you cut it, but (sadly – wish my day-rate was higher…!) this would still amount to not much more than – say – £1000 for total build.

The second thing we wanted to do was to provide some kind of genuine clarity into the process that we followed in the hope that it might help others. We hope we’ve done that to date, and intend to continue to do this into the future with various presentations, starting with a workshop at DISH 2009.

On a more practical level, we aim to take the plugin that we built, re-write it from the ground up and make it available for others to use in their WordPress installations. The Omeka approach is great – we can’t stress enough how impressed we were with the site, the documentation, the system itself – but we see that for many (perhaps larger?) institutions, a WordPress front-end coupled with an Omeka collections management backend is likely to be more flexible than a “one size fits all” approach of using Omeka to do everything. We both have some ideas which we’ll articulate later about how Omeka might be improved to help this and hope to be in touch with the Omeka team shortly.

Meanwhile, we’re going to snapshot the site we built as a showcase (possibly at a new subdomain – 12hrs.thefutureuseum.com or somesuch) and begin planning how we can take our main thefuturemuseum.com site forwards over the coming year. If you have ideas, please do get in touch!

Live…

Published November 2, 2009 Uncategorized Leave a Comment
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Well, that’s it. We’re out of time -  our 12 hours has elapsed….

See http://dev.thefuturemuseum.com/

There is a whole lot more we’d like to do (and if we’d had just ONE more hour….) but we’ll cover all of that in a blog post tomorrow morning and in the coming few days.

19:30pm – 2 hours remaining

Published November 2, 2009 time Leave a Comment
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Just a brief update: Dan has now coded up a rough and ready plugin which extracts data from the Omeka RSS response format. We chose the RSS one because it contains a reference to a nice 200×200 thumbnail image which Omeka generates. All things being equal we’d rather have used the “dcmes-xml” data (the data is better divided and chunked..) but for some reason this format doesn’t have a reference to the resized image without doing a double or triple call back to other feeds to get that data.

We’ve got two basic methods now running which let you embed Omeka objects within any WordPress page:

[object=sci-fi] returns all objects that have been tagged “sci-fi”

[object=123] returns the specific object with id 123

Initially, we were expecting to jump users across to the Omeka installation when they clicked on “collections” and back to the WP site for anything else. We’ve since decided that rather than having to re-skin an entire second site and suffer things like incorrect permalinks in the global nav and so on, it is easier to script so that our objects are all pulled in to WordPress.

Once we’ve got over this crazy 12 hour build idea, we’ll be working more closely on the WP/Omeka plugin and hopefully releasing it for others to build on.

Here’s a screengrab of our “Featured exhibition” page:

Featured Exhibition - screengrab

 

Meanwhile, I’ve been tweaking the CSS, adding that beautiful (but not yet finished!) left-nav and generally tidying stuff up…

 

4:20pm – 5.5 hours remaining

Published November 2, 2009 time 3 Comments
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We’re another couple of hours down the line. Dan has built a custom WordPress homepage to grab content from various bits around the site. We’re doing this using the standard WordPress <!–more–> function and although it isn’t the only way, as Frankie points out in his comment, we ran out of time researching other solutions.

Dan has been hard at work building up the homepage – you can see where we’ve got to here:

homepage_screengrab

The basic components are all here: under the hood we have the basic gridded CSS including the top nav and the footer. You’ll also see the basic bits of our homepage wireframe starting to take shape: top left is our “featured exhibition” – this grabs selected content (the bit before the “<!–more–>” tag) from our “featured exhibition” page. Ditto the “about” and “where we are” text.

Next up is the hard bit for Dan – he’s coding up a custom plugin to grab Omeka object content and insert it into any page on the site. We’re planning on doing this using shortcodes (a pretty standard WordPress construct) – say for example:

[object=browse/tag/sci-fi]

[object=show/121]

Into the future we could expand this so it also includes variables for template or other filters, or ultimately have a way of including it in the WP RTE (“Insert object”). For now though we’re getting the basics right.

We’ll be using Omeka’s powerful alternative response formats to do this – basically our page will grab the XML from the object(s) we’ve requested, return that XML and then render it to our page using XSLT.

Meanwhile I’m going to be sketching out the wireframes for some of the other pages on the site, continuing to write content and designing some graphic bits and bobs. All go!

We’ve begun…

Published November 2, 2009 time Leave a Comment
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Well, it’s the 2nd November. 11:12 am, and we’ve begun…

After the usual fiddlings with Wifi, cables and coffee, we’re now both online and sitting in Box UK’s London office in Poland Street.

According to our timesheet we have just under ten hours remaining to build a museum website. If you have a look you’ll see that all we’ve done so far is to pave the way: we’ve installed WordPress and Omeka, set up some standard pages according to our draft IA and done a little bit (not a lot!) of thinking about how we’re going to approach the problem.

To give us some structure today, we’re going to be using an outline process suggested by Jesse James Garrett, and it goes something like this (click for text version):

jjg_outline

See those times? Scary, huh? :-)

So right now we’re talking scope, finalising the IA and then we’ll move on to a bit of wireframing. If you’d like to hear my swearing (!) then we’re streaming live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/museum-in-a-day

11_15_am

By the way, we’ve decided (stop shouting CHEATS!) that it is only fair that we don’t count the time we spend documenting today. So this blog post, tweets and anything following which isn’t the actual build of the site don’t go towards our total…

Plugins, themes and the IA

Published October 29, 2009 time Leave a Comment
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Monday the 2nd is clearly going to be a busyish kind of day, so doing grunt work now is probably wise.

With this in mind, I’ve just spent 40 minutes preparing some WordPress stuff which falls into the “we know we’ll want this but don’t quite know the final details” category. Luckily, WordPress is on the whole a fairly forgiving platform. You can make a whole bunch of decisions up front without having to commit to something you regret further down the line.

My forty minutes were spent installing plugins and putting in a temporary theme so that we can start to populate the site with content.

Plugins, for those of you who don’t know, are used to extend WordPress functionality in various ways. Because WordPress is a hugely active community, there is a plugin for pretty much anything you care to mention. Want to put your Flickr pictures in the sidebar? Need a contact form? A breadcrumb? A Google sitemap? Event calendar? Hot buttered crumpets on your homepage? (I made that one up, but hey – nice thought…). You get the idea: there is probably a plugin for whatever the thing is you’re trying to do. And if there isn’t, you can always write one.

There are a couple of must-haves, plugin-wise. The absolute 100% must is Akismet, which does a pretty fine job of catching comment spam. I’ll leave others to recommend their favourites: today I’ve installed Akismet, Contact Form 7, Google Analyticator, Simple Section Navigation Widget and Unfiltered MU.

futuremuseum_themes

WordPress themes are used – not entirely surprisingly – to make a WordPress site look a particular way. We’ll almost definitely be developing our Futuremuseum theme from scratch, but it is helpful at this stage to have some kind of visual framework to hang content on, even if it will ultimately bear no visual resemblance to our final site.

There are literally thousands of WordPress themes available out there. Many are free, some are paid. As always, Google is your friend when looking for themes. I was on the hunt for something vanilla and simple – you can see a few I went through in the image above. One of them was built by my good friend Darren Beale, who developed WordPress Naked as a starting point for anyone wanting to develop their own theme quickly.

Both themes and plugins are trivial to install: you download a zip, unpack it, then upload to the relevant place in the wp-content directory on your hosting. Then you just use the WP dashboard to enable the stuff you’ve added.

Once I’d got that out of the way, I went quickly through my initial information architecture and added all the pages into the hierarchy. We’ll probably lose or move pages along the way, but for now it helps just to have a rough outline of what is left to do.

Finally, I fiddled with the site and plugins as suggested in this excellent post to make our WordPress iteration less blog and more CMS-like.

Time spent implementing plugins and IA: 40 minutes

Money spent: £0.00

Choosing a website platform

Published October 27, 2009 Uncategorized 4 Comments

So we were considering WordPress (MU), Omeka, Drupal and Joomla. I’m not particularly well versed in any of these systems, but after some research and a little bit of tinkering, I came to the following conclusions (presented in handy table format). These may or may not be wholly accurate, but are what seem to be the case after my initial research.

WordPress MU Omeka Drupal Joomla
Multi-Site ✔ × ✔ × (needs an extension)
Documentation ✔ ✔ ✔ (but confusing) ✔ (though the wiki a bit confusing)
Plug-ins
(inc. availability)		 ✔ ✔ (though limited) ✔ ✔
Content Types
(esp. for Collections)		 × (through plug-ins, not particularly good) ✔ ✔ (through CCK) × (through plug-ins, not particularly good)
Ease of Use
(of admin UI)		 ✔ ✔ × (a bit too large to be easy) ✔ (though confusing nomenclature)
Flexibility
(as a CMS)		 × × (doesn’t have ‘pages’) ✔ ✔

I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by how professional and comprehensive the online presence (help, screencasts, documentation, demo site) for Omeka is, and conversely a little surprised at how basic Joomla is, given that it is often compared to the more competent Drupal.

Although Drupal ticks many of the boxes, given our aggresive timescales, and my lack of understanding when reading the online documentation, I just don’t think we have the time to learn what is undoubtedly a good system, but has a steep learning curve. For example, just trying to find out basic information about the templating language on the official documentation site seems to be tricky (maybe I’m not looking in the right place, but whatever – it doesn’t seem to match how I look for things).

Given the complexity of Drupal and the over-simplicity of Joomla, that leaves WordPress – great for content, but not for ‘content types’ (objects, exhibitions, etc), and Omeka – great for content types (objects, exhibitions, etc) but not for generic web content.

So we’ve decided to take a hybrid approach – using ‘best of breeds’ applications: both WordPress MU and Omeka. We’ll use WordPress to build the majority of the site, and use Omeka for the ‘collections’ parts. Hopefully we’ll be able to build a WordPress plug-in/widget to integrate the Omeka (collections) content into any page.

Created Logo Suggestions

Published October 24, 2009 time 8 Comments

I just mocked-up some quick logo suggestions (given our short timescale, we can’t spend too long on the creative side). I’d previously downloaded some ‘old style’ free fonts from dafont.com for another side project (The Januarist), so it was fairly quick to cycle through these for our museum name, using Adobe Fireworks.

I chose a colour scheme from Kuler, trying to find something that reminded me of an ‘old’ palette, but not in the sepia/brown style; it had to also represent the ambitions of the future.

For most of the logo suggestions, I reduced the tracking and line-spacing, as I think a logo should feel fairly solid and ‘together’. I’m also a massive fan of the Hoefler Text typeface; it has a huge variety of styles (oblique, condensed, etc) which sit nicely together – hence my use of this in two of the logo suggestions.

If we’d had more time, I would have liked to experiment with a mixed typeface for the logo – perhaps a serif for ‘The’ and ‘Museum’, and a sans-serif (maybe something clean like Helvetica or Futura) for the word ‘Future’, to try to get a mix of old/new. I would also have liked to try being creative with the spacing and italics of the words: italics giving a sense of ’speed’ (for ‘future’), and objects with space to the right of them being interpreted as ‘looking to the future’ (going forwards), and objects with space to the left of them are typically interpreted as ‘looking into the past’. I think there are things we could have done with this, given more time.

I also tried using a copyright-free ‘Raygun’ illustration in one of them, just to add an element of creativity (having not an ounce of artistic talent in my bones).

I’m not sure which (if any) we’ll use, but for the final version we’ll need to size the logo so that it’s in-keeping with our modular grid layout, which will probably be a 60 pixel unit grid horizontally, and an 18 pixel grid vertically.

The Future Museum - Logo Suggestions

Time spent developing logos: 25 minutes

Money spent: £0.00

Initial Information Architecture

Published October 22, 2009 time 6 Comments
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I’ve just spent 20 minutes working on the beginnings of a draft IA for the futuremuseum website.

For this, I used an online mind-mapping tool called Mindmeister, which I’ve used successfully with loads of clients before.

Mind-mapping is ideal for sketching out information architecture because the node-type visual approach appeals to people far more than text; also it is extremely easy to move nodes around, try new things, infer links and so on. Mindmeister adds to this functionality by providing the means to collaborate – once I’d drafted this top-level navigation, I just sent Dan the link via Skype for him to look over and amend.

mindmeister1

The actual components of the IA are simple at this stage – to get them I just spent a few minutes browsing a couple of museum websites and compared / contrasted between them to extract the common components. We’ll develop this as we go (feel free to bookmark the direct link to the map!) – it’ll be interesting to see which bits change as we go along.

If you’ve got any ideas for missing bits (I should add: feasible missing bits!), please let us know in the comments!

Time spent developing IA: 20 minutes

Money spent: £0.00

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