Wordpress integrated into News section
The News, Blog and Spotlight sections of the NZMuseums website now run on top of Wordpress. This has allowed us to provide several new features:
- News Search
- Browse articles by categories, recent posts and author
- RSS feeds by category and author
- Automated notification of comments to both authors and commentors
You can see these features on the News page.
Object detail page enhanced
- new icons for object type (art, photography, history etc)
- better layout
- new image slider and zoom option
- Share button to share the page on social networks
You can see an example of this with Raglan Museum’s carved tobacco pipe.
Museum directory page enhanced
- search a museum’s collection from the directory page
- better layout
- new image slider and zoom option
Here’s Raglan Museum’s new directory page.
Eventfinder integration
In Feb 2010 the NZLive events website was merged with Eventfinder. We’ve reworked the What’s on search page and museum directory page events to use Eventfinder. All event information from NZLive has been migrated to Eventfinder.
Explore options extended
The Explore page now brings up a mosaic of object images, with options to explore by most interesting objects (ranked by comments, numbers of images, amount of cataloguing detail, numbers of tags and view count), most popular (by view count), and by tags. The tag cloud now gives an option to expand the tag view to the top 1000 tags.
Technical changes
The site has been reviewed to make the layout and styling more consistent and to improve the HTML markup.
Web addresses within the site now use shorter search friendly URLs, with redirects from the old addresses for each page.
eHive enhancements
NZMuseums is built on top of the eHive online collections management system. There have been many enhancements to this over the last few months, including additional cataloguing fields, better tools for managing pick lists, an image cropping tool and new administration reports. The next feature to launch will be new screens for managing object acquisitions.
Upcoming changes
This is the first phase of the NZMuseums redevelopment. In April we’ll be launching a new home page designed by McGovern Online and integration with DigitalNZ to show suggested related items in the DigitalNZ repository when you’re on the NZMuseums results page.