London Transport Museum website

London Transport Museum in Covent Garden came to altcom  in early 2009 to produce a subsite for its Learning section which is expanding.  The current pages are hosted on the main Transport For London (TfL) CMS which is a massive system supporting many different websites.  The level of control required by the London Transport Museum team for the expanded Learning section was such that another CMS solution was needed.  The new system still integrates with elements of the old CMS and also pulls in content from the museum Collections database and third party data sources using XML.

The LTM Learning subsite content will consist of everything within the current Learning pages plus other material, some of which will sit in the site and which will include mp4 videos, digital images, PDFs, mp3 files, Flickr feeds and flash interactives.

In the first instance this Learning site will echo the look and feel of the current  London Transport Museum site, and will seem to the user to be part of the LTM website.  Within that constraint the information architecture is being redeveloped and the objective is to make it visually more interesting and dynamic.

The CMS system being provided will allow the LTM team to extend the site themselves in the future.

Technical Environment

The technical environment for the London Transport Museum website is as follows:

• The website will run on Windows 2003 Web edition
• Apache Web Server 5.x
  
• PHP 5.x with MySQL 4.x
  

The website interfaces with a proprietary database gateway that links to the Museum's collection management system. This interface powers a online collection of 6,000 posters and 16,000 photographs. This interface serve s out XML which is pulled in by the Joomla CMS..

Timescale

The website is expected to be live at the end of July 2009