Rijksmuseum

This famous museum in the Netherlands has its collection of around a million objects on their website. This information is vastly complex and interlinked with all kinds of extra information, tools, references and more. The front-end of the website is partly flash, and partly HTML.

Xopus came into the picture for the museum as they needed a new content management system. The development of this new system had to be fast, and secondly, the system had to be user-friendly. Xopus was the key element in making a CMS that could be extended and was flexible enough to allow the designers of the front-end of the website to create whatever they could come up with. Without Xopus in the CMS, managing this front end would be far too difficult.

Editing a hotspot on a painting

A lot of images can be seen on the website. There are images that have zoom options, images are shown in pairs where points on the images can be compared. Hotspots on images can be indicated to show the interesting features of the object, and croppings that can me defined for images in order to enable the website management users to either cut off unnecessary content, or again to create focus or nice views on an image. All these different renderings of images can be edited through Xopus.

The Rijksmuseum has defined a scheme for the XML for each type of page that they want on their website. By defining new pages, or extending existing pages, the CMS, which is built on Xopus, can support the management and editing of these pages. This flexibility on the part of Xopus as an XML editor within the CMS makes for a very customizable system. Starting out with just five types, the museum now has more than thirty types of pages, each of which is supported by a scheme. Xopus thus keeps the entire structure of the Rijksmuseum website valid.

Considering the complex nature of the information that the Rijksmuseum website is maintained with, one would expect the management system for this system to be equally complex. Keeping track of relations between objects, links, references and structures of pages seems impossible. Within the editor however there is a simple structure, and links and references within pages are easily maintained using Xopus which seamlessly picks up what the CMS shows, and allows it to be changed.

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