Here are a few of the things we get asked about most often.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you can’t find the answer to something…
If you’re using The Museum Platform for everything then hosting, maintenance, daily backups, performance testing, uptime monitoring, SSL certificate and more is all included. If you’re using our 3rd party plugin on your own site then you’ll be responsible for that. We’ll still do all of the above for the part that is on the Platform.
No. We’re providing tools which work with your existing collections management system. You export collections data from your existing system and we then import this to the Platform so that the public can see your collections online. If you don’t have a collections management system we can still work with your data – we’ll just need it in CSV format mapped to our schema.
Yes, absolutely. You just need to map the DNS to The Museum Platform – we’ll show you how as part of our on-boarding process, or we can do it for you.
Yes. We realise that all museums are different – some have websites already, some don’t. We’ve built The Museum Platform so that you can choose the bits you need. We’ve got various ways of integrating into your existing website – embeds, a WordPress plugin or a standalone set of collections pages. We’ll figure out which is best once we know the details for your specific site.
If you’re doing everything with us, then no. We’re limiting the platform to a select few themes we’ve built or adapted ourselves. This helps us maintain the integrity and security of the platform. If you’re looking for something more bespoke, please get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.
If you’re keeping your existing WordPress website and using our 3rd party collection or stories plugin then yes, absolutely. These can be styled however you need so that your Museum Platform content fits in with your existing theme. If you have an existing web developer or designer then they can do this, or we can help if you need.
Yes. We’re committed to providing the best and most portable user experience for all museums and as part of this we have a “walk away” policy which ensures you can get at your data should you want to move to another system.
If you’re doing everything with us, then no. To make sure the platform continues to work in a secure, stable and consistent way we won’t be allowing the installation of plugins. If you have specific concerns or needs regarding this, please get in touch.
If however you’re going to continue using your own WordPress site then absolutely – but with the normal caveat which is that plugins sometimes “bash into” each other, causing unexpected issues. We’ll help you test and make sure this isn’t the case with our plugin, but there is a vast ecosystem of plugins out there so we have to look at any issues on a case by case basis.
No 🙂
Our commitment to open data and transparency drives us to choose to use open source elements as widely as we can in our technology stack, in pursuit of transparency, modularity and transferability for the benefit of ourselves and our customers. The core of this stack is WordPress, the open source CMS built by a huge developer community, and about 90% of everything else we do is completely open, owned by our clients, or open source. This includes the CIIM middleware that drives our collections data layer.
However, we’re a platform and not a piece of software you install on your computer – so there are some caveats. You can find out more here.