20thcenturylondon.org is a partnership project between the Museum of London and 19 other London-based museums. It exists to make the collections held by these institutions more accessible, and in a way that links the items in the collections with the broader history of the city.
Key Features
Cron job importing content from CultureGrid, an organization that archives collection data and exposes it via a particular feed - in this case, into the Explore 20th century London site
Custom import module
Quizzes
Faceted search
‘Object browser’ which reacts to current search
Imported images embedded with copyright information
Updated design
About the project
The key aim for this project was to mirror the existing website and provide the public with as easy access as possible to these objects via vastly improved search functions. Detailed taxonomy terms categorise each item into themes, time periods and locations that make navigation through the collections direct, natural and fluid.
Increasing user engagement was another goal, encouraged by the addition of an interactive quiz alongside excellent overall usability via advanced search capabilities.
The new site also benefits from an improved editorial workflow.
Why Drupal was chosen
The client wanted to explore an open source replacement for their old ASP content management system that had reached end of life. We suggested a migration into Drupal, because we felt by combining it with Solr to improve search and by using the feeds module to import the external museum object data from CultureGrid that this gave us a useful starting point.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Apache Solr was used to cater for the client’s complex search requirements, and Facetapi enabled the use of search facets with Solr. Due to the limitations of the Windows based hosting, we called in Boost to serve cached pages.
