Sector(s)
Team Members
Petőfi Literary Museum (aka PIM) is the most innovative museum related to Hungarian literature. It has the largest collection of Hungarian authors’ digital works, biographies, photos and much more which means over 1.000.000 searchable content.
In the beginning of 2015 they realized that their internet presence was out of date. The frontend needed a facelift and to become responsive. The structure of the main site and its several subsites was very complex and so was the more than 10 years old database system. Managing and providing the huge amount of images, audio and text data went at the expense of nice visualization, optimal security and needed technical staff involved.
Petőfi Literary Museum wanted to increase site traffic and museum visits by creating an impressive, modern user experience. They needed a site which looks good, is easy to use, works well on smaller screens too, and connects several databases seamlessly in the background.
Integral Vision Ltd. built this site for the museum on Drupal 7. It provides up to date information on events, exhibitions, news and includes independent subsites. The fresh design and sophisticated typography matches the innovative exhibitions of the museum.
About the project
Make it easy to understand the site structure
The content of the old site(s) was a result of 5 decades operation of Petőfi Literary Museum. The data was stored in a more than 10 years old legacy database.
The PIM and IV staffs restructured the content around four main topics: Exhibitions, Events, Museum, Learning. The last one is built around the idea of lifelong learning beside helping researchers.
The developers in Integral Vision wrote a custom migration code on top of the Migrate module to move all the previous data into the Drupal database while some external resources are regularly imported to the site via an OAI Harvester interface.
Effective search
The huge amount of data (more than 1.000.000 items as we mentioned) and the characteristics of Hungarian language (the main language of the site) requires an effective search solution on the site.
Integral Vision integrated the de facto standard Solr search engine into the site using a bunch of related contributed modules and some custom code.
Uncompromising look and feel
Petőfi Literary Museum wanted an impressive, modern user experience to grip people's interest in literature. They needed a site which looks good, easy to use, works well on smaller screens too.
Integral Vision faced a lot of different challenges during the development but the biggest effort was to invent a rich user experience. While we created the basics of the custom theme for the site quickly, it took two months to reach the final look. The logos and general design brought by Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest (MOME) were a good base to work out the details. For example the daring background idea and a usable megamenu immediately appealed to the client. One of our favorite UX element is the 404 page which displays a random quote from the database including the “could not be found” phrase emphasized.
Why Drupal was chosen
Open source
The museum staff preferred an open source system for their new site, because they needed a quick development process with a tool which provides easily accessible references and avoids vendor lock in.
Good reputation
The people of PIM preferred not just an open source solution but Drupal itself. They knew that the new site of the Hungarian National Museum was built on Drupal 7 by Integral Vision and they found the results convincing.
Great support
The modular architecture of Drupal and the wide range of contributed modules shortens the development period of functions and reduces the number of custom solutions which makes further maintenance easier. Because a lot of base functions are provided ready-made (eg. usable admin area, menu management, role based permissions, content editing), developers had more time to work on small details which make the site unique.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Features
Integral Vision keeps the configurations in code under version control. In Drupal 7 Features is an indispensable module to make this possible.
Internationalization
The site needs to be used in different languages. In Drupal 7 the base tool for this functionality is the Internationalization module package.
Solr Search
This and the related modules (about a dozen) make it possible to search effectively in the large database of the site.
Calendar
We used a lot of contributed modules. The Calendar is a nice example of how we can get out of the box functionality using contributed modules, in this case displaying events in a calendar.
Bootstrap
The Bootstrap base theme helped Integral Vision to quickly develop a modern and nice theme.
