Mavericks Authoring with Pachyderm


The Mavericks project is scheduled to wrap up in the next week (officially, but there will be some straggling updates over the next few weeks, I'd guess). We've been using the latest beta of Pachyderm to author the online version of the Glenbow Museum's Mavericks exhibit. It's a huuuuuge project. I just did a screen count, and while it's lower than I estimated, it's still a behemoth. 1254 screens are currently authored, with another 150+ coming online tonight (once Shawn finishes up).

That's ~1400 screens, authored via the web interface, and compiled into a bunch of handy dandy flash websites for use as part of the Museum's online exhibits. By the way, that's the single largest test of Pachyderm 2.0, by several orders of magnitude. And, while authoring in a alpha/beta software package is a bit quirky at times, it actually worked surprisingly well. Boy, do I have some ideas for improvements though :-)

That's also a lot of picky little details that need to be cleaned up in the next few days. Stray images (over 1600 images were provided for the project), stray metadata, stray content, fun with MS Word "smart formatting" messing everything up (I'm going through a few of the published sections, and finding a LOT of those insipid MS Word formatting characters... Going to have to write some SQL to strip/convert them globally...). Template tweaks. Test. Review. Fix. Repeat :-)

While it's been an amazing test of Pachyderm, and a very cool project - I've learned a lot about Alberta history - I can't wait until this thing is wrapped up. Keeping 1400 screens and their supporting bits in my head has been hurting for a while now...

Once it goes live, I'll post links and stuff to share with the rest of the class.


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