Ghost for digital museum or archive?

Using Ghost
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Hey! Long-time Wordpress user and I’m tired of all the tinkering. Out of the box it seems Ghost has almost everything we need built-in, including memberships.

I run a digital genealogy “museum” or archive, which includes our publications, research, and collections. Would this be appropriate for Ghost? I’m curious if anyone has theme recommendations for something that is more image-focused or uses images for storytelling.

The one thing I’m not sure about are our collections. Currently, we use Tainacan in Wordpress for this, but this obviously won’t be possible with Ghost. I’m exploring other options like Omeka, CatalogIt, or eHive. The last two appear to have API access, but are they compatible with Ghost’s integrations? Or does anyone have any ideas about adding digital items - would Ghost’s in-built ‘collections’ work?

Any thoughts are welcome!

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Ghost has posts. If your data looks like a post, it probably works fine on Ghost.

It’s possible to group posts into collections using tags. But I’m not quite sure what your data format is, so not able to offer specific advice.

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Hi there. I think the data would work well as a post, but it would likely require a custom post template. Is this possible to achieve with Ghost Pro?

As an example, here’s what an item or ‘post’ looks like in our collections right now: example item in collections.

It has custom metadata on the right of the image. With group posts into collections and custom post templates, is this possible to set up?

Thanks for your help.

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You can make a custom template, but there are no custom post fields. I’d probably create all that content on the right as the body of the post, and then add tags for anything I wanted to be able to filter on.

You can load a custom theme (with your custom template) on Ghost Pro, as long as you aren’t on their starter plan.

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Hi @jaketheo,

i believe ghost fits perfectly your needs, regarding your post, maybe you could start with a structure of post you record in your snippets → Content snippets
So you can easily reuse it and and build it yourself. I you want to try the ghost backoffice, you can test it here → About this site

Best,

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Thank you both for your replies. I will think more on this.

I’ve started a Pro trial. At the moment I’m torn because Ghost handles the membership, newsletter, and publishing so seamlessly, and Wordpress is difficult for this.

Yet there are a couple of areas I’m still unsure, like custom page types and how to manage the museum collections.

I might engage an expert to inquire about a custom theme or modify a theme that’s close enough and add custom pages.

Is the recommendation to reach out directly to a freelance expert on Ghost for quotes?

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Heyo,

Have you tried Past Perfect? That’s a software specific to collections and archival work. You could also try CollectionSpace

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Here are some other links to people’s recs on archival software:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumPros/comments/7mx8ki/archival_people_best_software_for_a_collection/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Archivists/comments/lc6y54/what_collection_management_systems_do_your/