Amgueddfa CMS: the in-house content management system for National Museum Wales
Chris Owen, Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, United Kingdom
http://www.museumwales.ac.uk
At Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales we have developed our own custom content management system to power our web-sites, intranet and gallery work. It is focused on our position as a multidisciplinary museum spread across 8 sites in Wales and one which is almost completely bilingual in our output.
Amgueddfa CMS was first developed by Chris Owen in 2005 and has been rolled out in all our departments allowing designated users to manage web-pages, different types of media, collections information, blog entries, events and exhibitions, staff details, shop products and more.
Written in PHP & MySQL, Amgueddfa CMS provides a platform for development that is intended to be flexible and helpful without adding restrictions or unnecessary complexity. Content is built from PHP objects which inherit useful features such as methods for building AJAX applications alongside text-based applications with a minimum of code duplication.
The web-based administration tool is itself an Amgueddfa CMS site. Admin areas are built from datatypes and XML templates, allowing developers to provide access to new content in a matter of minutes, without writing new code. New Admin areas inherit useful features including granular user rights, workflow, metadata and search.
Amgueddfa CMS was used to build and manage our collections web-site Rhagor, which is featured in a talk this year by Graham Davies and Dafydd James.
Demonstration: Demonstrations - 1 [Close Up]
Keywords: CMS, bilingual, web, galleries, Rhagor, user admin
