Tag Archives: forum software

Google and flickr experiments

BIPS logoI’m just building a new website for the British Institute of Persian Studies to replace their old one . And I’ve been experimenting with adding Google and flickr to the basic Textpattern driven content management system. I haven’t gone down a plugin path for this, instead I’ve used a really good idea from David Ramos and adapted this to suit my idea for mapping research articles and archaeological site notes. The current website doesn’t offer this content (sites), so the information is currently lifted directly from Wikipedia and the Institute’s scholars may wish to expand it and correct Wikipedia’s errors if they exist. The basic result can be seen on my dev server version and has resized infowindows, short excerpts from the info, geo co-ordinates and a direct output (&output=kml) to Google Earth. I’m trying to decide whether mouseover or click is the best usability model for this interface, I am leaning towards the click as it allows you to focus better.
The last thing that I think I’ll do is add custom markers using the Society logo as the pointer but I need to be back in the office as I don’t have any image editing software on my macbook. So does the integration add value to this website? I think it helps visualise the locations that get mentioned in the text of the site.
I’ve learnt quite alot from these pages produced by the Blackpool Community Church JavaScript Team and the results are useful. Maybe I’ll do something with this for the Scheme’s website running data direct from the database.

The other thing that I’ve played with is 24Ways tutorial on parsing JSON data from flickr’s API to add value to the website and draw in current photos of Iran, Persia and archaeological sites. I’ve not done any JSON stuff before, but I like the result! As mentioned in the article, this output is at present undocumented, but seems a lot faster than the RSS method I use. You are still limited to how many photos you pull out and I can’t see how to just use Creative Commons licensed data as yet. So once again, like the google implementation, it is hard coded into one of Textpattern’s template pages that drive a section. For a simple CMS, Textpattern offers some great functions and is extensible. Better meta data handling would be great and a better image management or inbuilt gallery would also be brilliant. However, it suits my needs for projects like this.
Of course the Institute might hate it, and the design is still up for discussion but as it is CSS driven easy to change, I’m going to add some sand and desert plants to the background and the blues denote the sky. I’ve also started to build in microformats and I’ve also used zenphoto gallery for images (all temporary from the lovely Vesta Curtis) and I’m starting to integrate the forum software into the CMS.

Anyway, comments gratefully received….even if you hate it or think it could be improved. I’m still just dabbling with this technology lark.

Open source software

The Scheme runs on a rather tight budget, ergo we have quite a small pot for IT resources. The majority of our money has gone on buying development time from our excellent team at Oxford ArchDigital, who have produced our database and the procurement of two dedicated blade servers.

Our database uses open source technology on a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP platform (LAMP for short), and has decreased costs considerably.
The rest of our web resources have been created mainly by myself and also have used free and opensource technology. I’ve used quite a broad range of products, and the below details each one and provides a link to the place where you can get it. We also try to follow webstandards, valid HTML and CSS, tableless layout etc where ever possible, and we make a stab at being as accessible as possible.

  1. PHP
  2. MySQL
  3. Apache
  4. WordPress – used on this blog
  5. Textpattern
  6. Simplepie RSS parser
  7. Zoomify – not really OS – used for the zooming images in the coin guides
  8. Feedreader – really good desktop RSS feed reading
  9. fGIS – for creating maps – unfortunately no longer available
  10. Gallery2
  11. Filebrowser – lightweight thumbnailing programme
  12. Vanilla – forum software
  13. PHPBB2 – forum software – ours is pretty much dead now, and I hate it with a passion.
  14. Firefox
  15. Thunderbird email client
  16. Opera
  17. Microformats – not really software but coding standards
  18. Web mapping server
  19. Filezilla – opensource sftp programme. My favourite at the moment.
  20. Putty for server admin

So from that list you can see our diversity of software, no mention of Microsoft (not to say I don’t use their products!) I usually recommend that the Scheme’s staff use Opera or Firefox for their browsing, which has proved problematic to say the least with council IT departments, who are Microsoft or nothing. It should be recognised that IE sucks by now.

Some of these products, I haven’t used exclusively for the Scheme, but I have employed them elsewhere on Museum based projects. For example, Textpattern has been used as the CMS for the Eric Gill Society’s new website and I also installed Vanilla as their forum software and included a wide range of plugins built by other people.

I’m quite keen on the Textpattern CMS software at the moment, as you can convert it from Blog to dynamic website quite easily and it allows for authored workflows. It’s obviously not in the same league as large scale CMS software, but it suits many people and can produce rather stunning websites. For example: http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk. There’s loads more out there. Obviously, these CMS progs need quite a bit of work to be integrated with custom databases, but anything is possible.

There are obviously associated risks with going down the OS route to software procurement – security/ continuity of product etc; however, our experiences have left us able to create new web resources rapidly and with flexibility.

I’ve customised themes, functionality and styles for many of the products listed above, and some have proved to be very successful. Our forum is now all but closed due to the administration overhead; the gallery is added to by several users outside of the Scheme, as is this blog (not enough though….) So a community ethos is slowly developing. I think when the British Museum website gets developed in the coming year, and our prominence rises, we will attract more users physically and virtually. That remains to be seen.

You could say we’re trying to get towards a web 2.0 (horrible phrase – surely the web doesn’t need versioning it just evolves) type organisation. Tom Goskar {Wessex’s Archaeology IT guru} has recently talked about the Zoomr application, geo tagging photographs, and this is the sort of functionality that we’ll be implementing come September.

As it stands now, our system is able to produce GIS maps from any search where spatial data is attached {the only downside is the clunky client application.}
Our image records are all associated with an object, which is associated with a findspot. The findspot comes with geographical co-ordinates, so by using our Web Mapping Server and a GIS front end, we can produce geo tagged location maps based on your image search. We won’t be using Google Maps as our map provider, as we can’t afford the dev time to make changes if their API evolves – which it does! We’re also planning to allow users with registered accounts to tag images, records etc with their interpretation and thoughts about objects that we have recorded. There is quite alot of emotive or empathy that can be generated from the geolocation/object type/ chronology and this can be tapped into.

So we’re saving public cash, and that has to be good…..apart from the database, our grand total of spending for getting the websites and resources running at finds.org.uk has been £0 for software.