Whether you’re an IT specialist or a museum administrator, here’s what you need to know about the technology that we use to deliver the Museum Platform.
Whether you’re an IT specialist or a museum administrator, here’s what you need to know about the technology that we use to deliver the Museum Platform.
The top line
We handle hosting and everything that goes with it. Digital Ocean, Amazon Web Services and Hetzner maintain the hardware and backups, we do everything else. This includes daily updates and backups, monitoring, security updates and more.
Your exit strategy is built in. You can export all your data and content to an open format, at any time. This is as important to us as it is to you.
Security isn’t an issue. You can provide all your data to us in spreadsheets and zipfiles, without involving your firewall. If you do want us to import directly from one of your internal systems, we have the expertise to talk to your systems administrators and data security staff.
Our website technology
The Museum Platform is built in WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system, which we keep up to date via daily updates, along with a set of plugins and themes that we have built ourselves or carefully chosen and tested. The other key parts of the stack are:
- Server: Ubuntu Linux
- Language: PHP
- Database: MySQL
- Web server: Apache
- Hosting: Digital Ocean
We use WordPress, but you don’t have to! We have solutions that integrate with existing WordPress sites, as well as Drupal, Umbraco, flat file, JAMStack and more. And we’re always happy to talk about what works with your setup.
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.
And we can easily map your existing domains or subdomains to the platform.
Our collections hosting technology
Our collections hosting is powered by Knowledge Integration’s CIIM software. CIIM is enterprise-level software that brings together data from many sources, aligns different data sets, enriches data and makes it ready for public use.
CIIM is a Java application which talks to WordPress behind the scenes. It runs on a similar stack to WordPress:
- Server: Ubuntu Linux
- Language: Java
- Database: MySQL
- Search index: ElasticSearch
- Web server: Apache
- Hosting: Amazon Web Services
CIIM also supports public APIs if you want to make your data available for others to aggregate and use.
None of this replaces your existing collections management system. You export data from your existing system and we then import it, so that the public can see your collections online.
If you don’t have a collections management system we can still work with something as simple as a spreadsheet.