Drupal is proving to be the CMS of choice for many museums, cultural and heritage institutions including the Smithsonian, the Louvre, and the Art Institute of Chicago, just to name a few
This camp-style, pre-conference workshop will give you a solid understanding of the principles used to build scalable Drupal-powered websites. This all day session will contain six mini-sessions including:
- Information Architecture and Drupal Architecture: Best practices, tips, and techniques
- Review of the Top 50 Contributed Modules on Drupal.org (and other, lesser-known modules we really like)
- Mariners’ Museum Case Study: Selling Merchandise, Events, Image Licenses, and Pay-walled Content with Ubercart
- Using Drush, Git, cPanel, and Other Modules to manage dev -> test -> prod Staging Environments
- Drupal 6 vs. Drupal 7: Comparison and Benefits of Each
- Creating a Theme with the Zen Starter Theme
Commercial calendar products are often not flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the cultural heritage field, forcing many museums to make do with inadequate calendaring systems at great expense. Balboa Park Online Collaborative has developed a calendar package for the Drupal platform that handles the complex date functions highlighted above and an additional layer for aggregating event content from multiple sites into a central portal. They will show us how they did it in this one hour mini-workshop.
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision has designed and developed a complete technical architecture based on a Drupal installation to support (mobile) location-based services for cultural heritage. By building a location-aware application that utilizes the location information and related audiovisual heritage stored in the Drupal installation, users can access relevant information – based on their GPS location to enrich their on-site experience. In this presentation, they will highlight the design choices and explain the business case for platforms based on open source components.
The Transition to Online Scholarly Catalogues
In this session, Nik Honeysett of the J. Paul Getty Museum, will present his paper describing the challenges and successes of nine institutions as they step through a project to deliver a scholarly catalogue to their online environment. In several cases, Drupal is being looked at as an authoring tool that deploys into a database rather than publishing to a website; in other instances, institutions are supporting the curator’s desire to continue to use a word processing application as they have traditionally done.
Integration of Print and Digital Publishing Workflows
Sam Quigley and Elizabeth Neely of The Art Institute of Chicago, will share experiences gained from forging new integrated print and digital publishing workflows. Specifically, they will focus on their process and learnings from the Getty-funded Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI). While its development is still in the conceptual phase, they plan to employ a Drupal 7 middleware authoring environment where each catalogue’s elements are constructed and connected to external data assets in preparation for publishing.
The new Victoria and Albert Museum
website design uses a number of underlying technologies, including Drupal. This session will offer a case study of the content management issues that arose during the project, with the focus very much on the practical experience. The presentation will describe the key issues identified, how new processes were developed to address these issues, what worked and what did not and where compromises had to be made, with hints and tips included throughout.
If I missed any sessions, demos or workshops that have a Drupal component, let me know!
