Are you an agency or freelancer who has been asked by a museum or similar organisation to help them get their collection or other content on the web? We may be able to help…
Collections online
Many museums want to get their collections online and don’t quite know how to start. One of their first ports of call is often digital agencies, designers or developers who they ask to help them build this.
“…you can leverage our considerable technology and experience but on a site you design, host and manage.“
It appears simple – and at small scale, it is – but as soon as the museum (inevitably!) asks for filtering, faceting, zooms, taxonomy linking… or anything at scale (“we have 100,000 objects, will this work?”) things can get very complicated very quickly!
That’s where The Museum Platform can help. Our solution can be used on 3rd party sites – so you as agency or freelancer can leverage our considerable technology and experience but on a site you design, host and manage.
The “3rd Party Collections Plugin”
If your client has an existing WordPress website, or is making a new one with your help, then we have a solution in the shape of our 3rd party plugin. This is a normal WordPress plugin – you install it as you would any other, and we then give you some configuration keys which enables it to connect to The Museum Platform.
It’s pretty much plug and play – as soon as you’ve done this, you get an “out of the box” collections page together with facets, search, zooms and more. You can then style these pages as much as you need using standard CSS classes – or you can totally re-write the collections display templates if you prefer.
Case Study
Take a look at The Hunt Museum – their “Explore” section uses our 3rd party plugin to show their collection, all entirely within their own website and using their own (really very lovely!) design…
Not using WordPress?
If your client doesn’t use WordPress for their main site, stress not – we have three possible options for you…
- We’ll help them setup a subdomain on their main site which points to their collections which is hosted on The Museum Platform. We can either use our in-house design expertise to make this look like their existing site, or we can work with you and give you direct access to do this yourself.
- We’ve can expose a public API which would enable you to build totally custom interfaces into their data – you get the full power of The Museum Platform’s data model and search algorithms but can create whatever interface you need using whatever toolset you prefer.
- It’s in the works still but we’re building a vue.js app which will allow a “copy paste this line of code into your website” approach to collections online. Again, all styling will be dealt with using standard CSS so you can go nuts with your creativity!
3rd Party Museum Platform blocks
We’ve got a second plugin for installation on 3rd party WordPress sites which uses a shortcode based approach to pull in any of our custom Gutenberg pages. This means your client can use our powerful set of authoring tools on The Museum Platform to create timelines, maps, sliders, galleries and more and then you (or they!) can embed the functionality and content onto their own site however you need.
There are LOTS of options other than the ones outlined here – so it’s probably best for us to have a chat if you have specific technology or design related questions. We like talking about this stuff, so please get in touch if you see anything here that you think could help you build better websites for your clients!