Museum In A Day

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:

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!