Museum management server

As they move forward on the museum, I have been asked to provide software to help with administration.

I have neither the time nor the desire to build any software from scratch for this, so I'll be looking for off-the-shelf solutions. Omeka is a strong candidate for collection/exhibit management. It should also be capable of operating a mailing list through a plugin, but I doubt it will be able to handle accounting work.

Alternatively, I could set up a more general CMS. I'm currently exploring Wagtail for that purpose, which should allow me to present them with an extremely simplified user interface for day-to-day operations. It may even (with extra work on my part) offer some of the accounting features they want, all in a single package. There is also a plugin called birdsong for creating email campaigns.

As is now my custom, I intend to install all software in Docker¹⁾ behind an Nginx proxy. I also plan to offer my services as server admin on an ongoing (paid) basis, though I will not be playing daily help desk.

More details to come.

• collection management
• mailing list for newsletter
• donation accountability

Wagtail sites are segmented into apps, subpackages of the main site. Each contains Django models, templates, static files, and site event handlers (hooks and signals). My initial thought is to have the following apps:

• a blog-like news app for running the newsletter (bonus points if I can hook into birdsong to send a campaign each time a page is published to the news section)
• a catalog app for storing information on the collection (think the bakery demo's breads section)
• a home or main app to serve the homepage and link to relevant sections
• a private area for accounting, etc?

Interestingly, a dockerfile is included as part of the base template created by the start command. I haven't combed through it in great detail, but it could be very useful for deployment.