Today I downloaded three ‘platforms’ that we could potentially use: WordPress Mu, Omeka and Drupal (not yet installed or configured), so that we can ‘test them out’ and see which will give us the best efficiency/usability/simplicity/sophistication trade-off. There are a range of other platforms we could consider (e.g. Expression Engine), but with limited time, we have to look at the most popular (and recommended) options.
Although WordPress is a blogging platform, and not a CMS, it does offer a huge amount of simplicity and usability; Drupal is often confusing for the first-time (and second-time…) user. As this project is likely to be of-use to smaller museums, we have to take the usability of the administration system (and ease of installation) into serious consideration, so we’re keeping WordPress in the running, especially with modules such as Pods and Flutter that add CMS-like behaviour to the software.
Time spent downloading software: 10 minutes
Money spent: £0.00
I can certainly see the point with regards to ease of use and configuration with wordpress – particularly for the smaller organisation who wants to just get on and do it.
However, there is an important consideration to think of when thinking about museums – their data. By this I mean, and would understand, that any web presence of a collection of objects would need to be pretty well centred on the data *about* said objects. This makes a distinction between any informational offer about *the museum*, against any information about what the museum *contains*.
With this in mind (and this could take up the rest of your day!) I’d take a look at the aspect of semantic/linked data, and the fact that Drupal 7 is being built with that as a core. The Content Creation Kit (CCK) in Drupal would make it possible to create record types that then omit data in a semantic form – RDFa – allowing machines to search, find and connect to these datasets, not just humans. Check out:
http://buytaert.net/drupal-the-semantic-web-and-search
http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2009/03/18/nice-video-shows-how-hidden-structured-data-from-the-drupal-content-management-system-can-lead-to-semantic-search/
Sorry – this isnt meant as a slight against any decision to use WP – but thinking forward about the data that we will want to connect – what this man says!:
http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html
Blimey!
Hi Steven,
Some good points. I think we certainly need to think about building the site around the ‘requirements’ (which include object data), rather than around the limitations of the platform. And certainly objects make up a large part of what museums currently publish online (whether or not this should actually be the case is another argument).
However, I’m less excited by RDFa. I spent nearly 10 promoting RDF and now have finally thrown in the towel. RDF, RDFa, Microformats: whatever! It’s all the same old ‘hidden’ stuff that nobody cares about, only geeks produce, and nobody uses (OK, Google do now and again, but really? Does it REALLy matter to their index?). Whatever happened to meta tags, eh? Oh dear, sounds like I’m giving up on data. Help!
Dan
Hey Dan,
Wow – looks like you have spent a good while promoting data formats, so I can feel your pain!
There could be encouragement from the developments in terms of releasing data being taken by central government (http://thedextrousweb.com/2009/10/the-wraps-come-off-data-gov-uk/) and the BBC (http://welcomebackstage.com/2009/06/bbc-backstage-sparql-endpoint/), amongst other I hope.
I suppose the underlying question for Museum (website) in a day would be whether *the* data could be taken out in a standard format to be reused, which is probably starting to get off your core objective a little (apologies!). I’d say that WP does a pretty good job of that with the import/export facilities anyway..
Hi,
Just wondered why you considered Drupal rather than Joomla? From what I’ve seen Joomla has an easier to understand admin interface and does more things ‘out of the box’ as it were.
Cheers,
C
Steven – absolutely. I think it would be unfair for us to say we’re going to build a “museum website in a day” if it doesn’t meet the requirements of a modern museum website; one of which HAS to be access to the data. So I’d hope that we’d at least be able to expose an API to the data somehow.
Caroline – to be honest, I’m not sure, I just thought Drupal was the obvious choice. I suppose it’s from recent conversations with people at the V&A and IMA, who are both at least partly using Drupal in their systems. I’ll certainly download Joomla and have a quick play with it (I have no experience with it so far); if it seems like the quicker ‘out of the box’ option, then it may well be what we’re looking for – thanks for the reminder!
Lovely project – I’m looking forward to the liveblogging.
Re: Joomla/Drupal – we used to build sites with Joomla and moved to Drupal quite recently.
We-the-site-builders have a harder time now, but people-who-do-site-updates have it easier. (And we can do cleverer things, if that’s what’s required.)
When a page has a “box in the middle you put stuff in” for an artifact and you lay it out with an editor, it can be hard to keep a site looking good. That’s Joomla out of the box, basically.
When you have a form, with fields for all the attributes of an artifact, which goes off and builds the content itself, it seems to be easier. That’s Drupal, but someone has to build that form and that can be fiddly.
(That said – for what’s it’s worth, if I were building a museum in 12 hours, I’d be using WordPress.)
You´ve probably already chosen your platform by now, but if you´re going towards a full blown collections management system (and add another 24 hours perhaps!) you could check out Islandora (http://islandora.ca/) and Collective Access (http://www.collectiveaccess.org/).
They´re both open source PHP-applications and the backed for Islandora, Fedora Commons, would definitaley scale towards a complet archive/documents, library and museum collections data storage when your small museum grows up.