I asked one of our web designers to describe the technology we're using at the Walker Art Center:
It was asked if there were any museum web sites using a standards based layout, and we here at the Walker are working on such a project. It's really more than just a redesigned web site, it's a bunch of projects that will really change the way we work and think about our data and its output. First and foremost is the redesign of our web site, which we started about a year ago. It will be output in XHTML 1.0 Transitional, uses CSS and the like, basically following the W3C standards as much as possible. This of course gives us all the benefits mentioned elsewhere, but it's also much more than that. When we started thinking about the redesign, we knew we wanted to house all of our data in a database. The old Walker web site was mostly static files and was very difficult to maintain. The other thing we wanted was the ability to use the data entered not just on the web site, but in other forms as well. This led us to use an open source technology called Axkit. Axkit is basically an XML application server, that lets you translate XML into any other format, using XSL. The first benefit of this approach is it separates the backend logic from the presentation logic. Thus, the designer isn't stepping on the developer's toes when working on the frontend design, and the developer isn't messing with the design when working on the backend logic. The only real caveat here is that the XML schema must be agreed upon for both the developer and the designer, which is fairly easy. Basically how it works is that the developer writes Axkit code to pull data out of the database and into an XML format. The designer than uses XSL to translate that XML into any other format, in our case with the redesign it's XHTML. What becomes even more powerful is that since the XML data can be translated to any other form, we can use the same data and XML to output to just about any device. For example, for our upcoming online calendar, we're outputting an RSS feed for news aggregators. This literally took us minutes to implement since we're using the same XML used on the online calendar, and just formatting it as RSS instead of XHTML. Soon we will take this one step further and output in vCal format, which is a format used in various calendaring systems (such as iCal on Mac OSX), using the exact same original XML data. But that's really just the beginning. A lot of applications now use XML for data importing and we're finding a lot of different ways to use the data from our databases on various types of output. All of the Flash on our redesigned web sites will use XML for dynamic image and data loading. We can easily make WAP versions of our sites for cell phones and PDA's. And it goes beyond just "web" devices. One of our goals is to have interactive signage in the new expansion of the Walker Art Center. These signs can be driven from the exact same database and dynamic XML, allowing us to reuse our tools and data throughout our new building. Another goal is to give XML output to our design department, which they can then import into Adobe Indesign for all of their content for things like our print calendar, etc. It's pulled from the same database as our online calendar. Thus our database becomes the container for which all of our data at the museum is placed. To do this we're also building a custom web-based admin system to manage all of this data. The process of this is almost complete and will allow staff here to enter data of various types to be used in the different ways described above. This is not only for content, but also our media (images, movies, music, PDF's, etc) will be stored and managed through this admin system. This gives us one place to manage most everything we need, and includes an entire approval process for both text and images, various permissions, privlages, etc. It changes the way we have done things in the past, but greatly simplifies and expands it. We are lucky enough to have an in-house staff of four full time employees dedicated to these projects in our New Media department. Our next big goal is the middle of February when the Walker Art Center closes for construction of our building expansion, and we will launch the first phase of our web redesign. It will be a mixture of different looks and feels under the concept of "neighborhoods" where each department/program gets its own unique site, all under the umbrella of the Walker Art Center. Not every neighborhood will be finished in February, we plan to finish out the site and the other things mentioned by the time the Walker reopens in February 2005. It's been a ton of work (and will continue to be), but the work we've been doing really gives us a solid foundation to build upon for the future. Brent Gustafson -- Robin Dowden Director, New Media Initiatives Walker Art Center [email protected] 612.375.7541 walkerart.org mnartists.org --- You are currently subscribed to mcn_mcn-l as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [email protected]
