The first phase of a large batch of changes on NZMuseums has been completed. We’ve added search friendly website addresses, WordPress integration for the News section, new image zoom functions and a batch of other changes. You can read about it in full on the NZMuseums website.

We’ve also fine-tuned how the pick list functions work over the last couple of weeks. You can now type into any pick list field and the possible matches will be presented. There’s also now the option to select a term from the Edit Pick List screen for use in the current record.

NZMuseums.co.nz is a website brought about by National Services Te Paerangi (which forms a part of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington) in partnership with Vernon Systems Ltd. It features a directory of 400 New Zealand museums and galleries, who also have the opportunity to catalogue and contribute their collection items online. This is the first step in showcasing collections online for the majority of participants. Because the NZMuseums site is built utilising eHive as its foundation, the content that is on the site is also present within eHive as our very first community.

Go to the NZMuseums community »

Over the last month we have gone through several technical upgrades to the eHive site, upgrading the operating system, application server and Java version. These changes will give us a good foundation for the planned enhancements in the coming year.

The latest upgrade to eHive included:

• Bug fixes for the application we use internally to bulk load data into the eHive website
• Bug fix for image derivative creation which was not running in some cases. This was caused by the upgrade to Java 1.6 earlier in the month.
• Social booking button added to the object, account and community pages to make it easy to share links on social networking sites to pages you like on eHive

There was a minor upgrade of eHive on 28th October 2009 which included:

– New Explore page Most Interesting Objects

This page ranks object records on eHive by several factors, including the amount of text information, the number of images of the object, the number of comments and tags and the number of views of the page.

– Underlying changes to support the NZMuseums search widget. We’ll be able to show you the widget in the next week or so!

– Bug fixes. Two bugs were fixed in this release. Deleted objects that were restored from the Recycle Bin were not appearing in public searches and in some combinations users were getting a server error on publishing an object record.