Okay so this post doesn't sound as exciting as Codeos and round-ups of fun stuff but it's still worth a few moments of your time...

We're all very pleased to say that our latest Cogapp-developed museum website launched a couple of months ago, created for the National Portrait Gallery. In fact, our working relationship with the Gallery goes way back to 1990s (remember them?), when we were commissioned to build their 'original' site, the Portrait Explorer kiosks and an accompanying CD-ROM.

The existing site was very much of its time: based on databases and built with HyperCard, it consisted mostly of flat, static pages.  By 2008, when our work on the new site began, the needs of both staff and visitors had evolved and we clearly needed to take a completely fresh approach. Not least to the back-end processes through which Gallery staff update and add to the site.

At the heart of this new approach was our selection and use of a new content management system, or CMS. Just in case you don't know: a CMS is a tool that facilitates the creation, editing and control of web content, usable even by those who have no technical training. For a client like the National Portrait Gallery, this means that staff at the Gallery can easily and visibly update their own content while the site remains live. A CMS gives the user a lot of autonomy and flexibility because they're not tied to the developer to make small changes to layout and other minor revisions. Most of all, using a CMS is completely separate from the back-end processes, meaning that if anything goes wrong, it's most probably the developer's fault, which hopefully makes it easier to fix! And finally, a CMS ensures that content is separate from design. If changes to layout are made, it doesn't affect the valuable, often very substantial content.

There are many different flavours of CMS, both commercial and open-source, and it was important to choose just the right one for the Gallery's needs. We drew up a matrix of their requirements, narrowing it down to just 2 or 3, and it soon became clear that the open-source MODx was the right choice. MODx stood out from the sea of competitors thanks to its excellent management system. Everything about this - creating standardised sites with a hierarchical structure, locating information, creating pages exactly how and where you want to - works very well.

From the point of view of Gallery staff, this equates to ease of use. The structure of the pages in the editor mirrors the structure of the pages in the actual site, making it simple to find and move information. It's almost like pressing a button and the site online becomes editable. Users often report that it is a particularly accessible and easy to use system compared to some rival CMSes, too.

Developing with MODx has proved a very positive experience, too. The process of turning our initial designs into HTML templates and integrating them into the CMS was quick and efficient. MODx is written in the PHP programming language, making it ideal for creating add-ons. For example, we built a Portrait Panel facility from scratch for the website, which enables anybody using the CMS to insert a Portrait Panel on a page. Simply by entering a portrait I.D. number, the website brings up the correct portrait along with keystone information (title, sitter, etc.), appropriate formatting and a choice of sizes, where staff previously had to do all this manually. Another new feature is the Explore system, which allows users to create collections of portraits around themes (Victorian and Edwardian, for example) by inputting a list of portrait I.D. numbers. A richly interlinked web of images emerges where works are cross-referenced by artist, sitter, era and more.

Finding the right CMS, one which optimised development time both pre-and post-launch,  was a key stage in this project. We're delighted with the way it has turned out for our clients and if you have a look at the site, we hope you will be too.

Check out: the Collection; the Explore pages; the shop; the events calendar; the nifty federated search.

Thanks for reading and thanks also to Emilia who did most of the leg work for this one!