I work for a Science Museum in Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA. As part of a larger initiative to provide scientific learning opportunities and science context to the daily news we have created a site called "The Science Buzz" (http://ltc.smm.org/buzz) We hope to build a community of people who can engage with the content here before/after they visit our museum as well as folks who may never visit the museum.
The site is currently a prototype but is fully operational. It lives within a secured webkiosk using (SiteKiosk) on the museum floor as well as being open to the public on the internet. Drupal has been a wonderful solution for this site for several reasons:
- Allows non technical exhibit developers to easily author content for the public
- Aggregator allows us to syndicate science news from all over the world. The drupal coding framework also allowed me to "hack" the module to include some new functionality without too much pain and struggle.
- The PHPTemplate system allowed me to easily style dynamic content but also gave me enough latitude to build my own PHP scripts into the pages within the structure of Drupal
- The HTML structure of the majority of the default drupal stuff allows for me to build a site which I can say is pretty much semantic markup but still has a very rich visual appeal.
I still have some things to figure out but they are coming along:
- Using the web interface to embed images in stories. Yes, I know about the image and image assist modules. I guess I am just holding out for 4.6 to see what new things pop up.
- Getting the poll module to work at a kiosk. We have an IP problem.
- Getting museum visitors to comment on the stories.
- How to call drupal functions from within template files??
- And there is more functionality coming soon that I am sure will present more interesting technical challenges.
Comments on the site would be welcome.
