Posted by gagarine on July 2, 2014 at 12:51am
Hello,
Every Museum/gallery have the same needs. They need a way to manage and display their collection, add event, add exhibitions, sell stuff on a store, blogs,...
This sound like a good match for a Drupal distribution.
Do you know any work already done in this direction?
Regards
Categories: distribution profile
Comments
Yes, please share ...
As a web developer for a museum, and currently in charge of looking into re-engineering our CMS, I have been wondering along the same lines: Drupal seem to be the preferred CMS for many museums, and I have been curious to pinpoint why this is. Why, for instance, should we choose Drupal over WordPress?
Wordpress is probably just
Wordpress is probably just fine if you want to do a basic brochureware style website. Personally I find Drupal to be a much better platform to work with as a developer in general. The wordpress API flat out sucks, and many of the "tools" available to developers are so far behind the times for what is considered best practices these days. And don't even get me started on the data model (or lack thereof).
Now having said that, I am also not a drupal evangelical to the point where I would consider it the only viable platform either. The nice thing about drupal is that there is a healthy pool of contrib modules to work with to do alot of the heavy lifting thus requiring less time developing and getting more bang for your buck. There are several frameworks available that i would consider extremely viable (Django and Laravel immediately come to mind). The down side to those is that you are going to be doing all the heavy lifting yourself.
The current environment that we are working on is a 2 part system utilizing Django and Drupal. And we have been quite happy with it thus far. Django manages harvesting collections data and digital assets, and the drupal site talks to this system via REST to integrate the online collections into the drupal front end.
The duality of this system really lets each framework handle our information for which it is best suited.
I had a friend here in Berlin
I had a friend here in Berlin who started with drupal but ended with wordpress cause it ́s much more easier, especially with an already good UX/UI in the backend, especially on image galeries.
To be fair, it's been a
To be fair, it's been a number of years since I dug into Wordpress seriously so my knowledge is a bit out of date. For a certain class of site it is a good tool.
The big selling point of Drupal is that it is built as a CMS, not as a page-building-tool. There are page-building tools for it, and the line is often fuzzy, but Drupal doesn't manage pages; it manages content. That's a subtle but important distinction and is where much of Drupal's content-reuse capability comes from.
The other selling point is that it's underlying systems and APIs, particularly in Drupal 8, are very robust. That means if you want a CMS-with-some-apps, or a CMS with a lot of customization, etc. the tools are there for that. Eg, there's a half-dozen ways to do 3rd party content integration with Drupal depending on the specific use case, and at Palantir.net we've found a fit for most of them when working with museums. Integrating with a DAM or Collection system is a very common feature request; it always requires some custom code, but we've yet to run into a system we can't interface with somehow to produce a clean, integrated front-end experience for the user.
Add calendar to the list
I'd also mention that one of the main features we look for while thinking about our re-engineering of the CMS, is the ease of implementation and ease use of a calendar module/plug-in. I gather this is something most museums and galleries need for their web pages, too?
When I say "event" I was
When I said "event" I was thinking about some kind of date related content.... you can say it's a calendar.
Date functionality is in
Date functionality is in Drupal 8 core, and is handled in earlier version by the Date module, which also allows for repeat dates, etc. Date works in tandem with the Calendar module to produce calendared content displays. That said, the Drupal 7 Calendar/Date modules have some definite problems (especially with repeating dates), but they're the best solution for now.
Here's the museum calendar I put together in D7: http://deyoung.famsf.org/calendar/. Not 100% pleased with it, but it does the job, for now.
What are the needs
So technically I have a good understanding of what is possible and how to do it. I was thinking creating entity like the commerce module did.
But I'm interested of what would be the needs.
Also any information around standard/format to store/export Art object and so on...
There is no ONE solution
Hi gagarine,
I've been following the posts here. The short answer is that there is no ONE solution fits all. Everyone has a different infrastructure and uses what their tech management thinks is best for the museum (or perhaps their career).
Also, it's useful to note that museums and galleries have different requirements. In some cases, vastly different.
Meezaan-ud-Din Abdu Dhil-Jalali Wal-Ikram
This the power of drupal, you
This the power of drupal, you can create something standard and after with just custom module extend/overwrite what you want to change to meet specific requirement. Or you can disable modules than provide functionality you don't need (for example the shop).
If you have experiences with galleries and museums I'm very interested by their requirements and how they differ.
Indeed
Yes, I'm familiar with the power of Drupal. I've been developing with PHP for over a decade, and Drupal really is quite something.
What you ought to be doing is moving towards developing modules OR something that ties in multiple modules.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the owners of http://vesica.ws.
We will be launching Drupal module shortly, but that does not mean we are selling a ONE stop solution for everything required for museum collections.
Pick a certain function a gallery or museum would want, and build that as a standalone module.
There are several standards for museum collections management. Look at Spectrum, CDWA, etc. In general, stick to Dublin Core, then the more you have, the merrier.
Re galleries vs museums. For collections management, at least, galleries want to store the minimum required to sell. Museums as much as they can because conservation and knowledge is (or should be) the goal.
In my opinion, the shop is not a useful one to make. Ubercart does it all.
Collections management in Drupal - perhaps. It has already been attempted in Joomla by a major museum software company.
Meezaan-ud-Din Abdu Dhil-Jalali Wal-Ikram
Check out the Demo Framework & Restaurant-Distros
Have a look at these ones:
Demo Framework:
- https://www.acquia.com/downloads/df or https://www.drupal.org/project/df
- DEMO-Site: http://us.demo.acquia.com/ -> very beta !!!!
Restaurant:
- https://www.drupal.org/project/restaurant & http://arshad.github.io/drupalrestaurant/
- Video-Guides: https://www.drupal.org/node/1944876
- DEMO-Site: http://dev-restaurant.gotpantheon.com/
Interesting article: mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com
http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/migrating-a-complex-museum-webs...
TAP
TAP is a collection of free and open-source tools which support the creation and delivery of mobile tours. The tools also serve as examples of producing and consuming tour content using the TourML specification. Currently TAP consists of authoring tools built on top of the content management system Drupal, a native iOS mobile application, and a web-based mobile application built upon the jQuery Mobile library.
URLs to TAP:
- http://tapintomuseums.org
- https://code.google.com/p/tap-tours/
- https://github.com/imamuseum
Some more resources:
- http://www.fuseiq.com/our-work/art-institute-chicago -> DRUPAL 7 based
- http://www.aam-us.org/resources/center-for-the-future-of-museums
- another CMS: http://www.piction.com/vfour/case-studies/