Minneapolis Institute of Arts
I wrote the php content management system that drives this site as we were preparing to open the new addition to the museum. It brings together basic content management with a few other database projects I previously wrote to support a calendaring system and a collection viewer.
What works
The biggest success of this project is that it really got us to where the majority of the site was able to be edited by non-technical users. Why make the nerds the gatekeepers of information? It only irritates us. The integration of an existing calendar system lowered the amount of training necessary during an amazingly busy and stressful time. I expanded the collection area to add some really cool personalization features.
What I’d do differently
Though I like the system we ended up with, it probably would have been better in the long term to have written extensions to an open source content management system to serve our needs. By doing so, we could have taken advantage of the countless open source plug-ins out there and even collaborated with other museums to write museum specialized ones. Maybe one day, I’ll get to that.