Overview
Created as a companion to The Civil War in Missouri exhibition by the Missouri History Museum, this website was launched in several phases over the course of a year.
About the website
The first phase was a promotional site, touting the rich educational resources coming in June 2011, with a preview version of the events calendar and artifact gallery. It launched in August 2010.
This first phase was replaced and augmented in June 2011 with the relaunch of the site. Hundreds of archival photos, artifacts, documents, and other primary source materials were added to the Artifact Gallery. Each item in the gallery enlarges to a JavaScript-based zoomable version. By not relying on the more typical Flash for this functionality, we enabled the Gallery to easily work on devices like iPads.
With this phase we also built out the For Educators section. We added dozens of information sheets, primary source activities, worksheets, and recommended websites and books. The materials are organized by Topic and by grade band (4th or 8th Grade) and all of the primary materials referenced in the info sheets are available as hi-res PDF downloads.
The new My Collection feature allows registered users to save and sort materials and pages that they encounter as they navigate the website. In one easy to access place they can save their links to info sheets, Artifact Gallery entries, etc. With a username and password, users can maintain these personal pages.
In addition to the content in For Educators and Artifact Gallery, the Events section uses a clever map selector to allow users to sort upcoming events by region in the state. This events calendar is fed by an XML feed from the Missouri tourism group, but site administrators can add their own Museum-specific events.
The entire website is built on a Drupal CMS. Site admins with little or no HTML skills can add, edit, and delete all of the content quickly and easily.
In July 2011, an interactive time travel game was added to the site and in November 2011 an interactive timeline/map of the Civil War in Missouri, activities for each of the exhibition's eight themes, and a Civil War Tour were added.