Our February 2026 newsletter featured the “Local Images” website built for Manchester Central Library (MCL), which we launched about a year ago but recently enhanced with metadata derived using what is often vaguely referred to as “AI” (including in our newsletter). Although the whole newsletter was devoted to the topic, in the interest of brevity … Read more
Tl;dr: the AI boom has created an increase in the number of bots crawling websites to harvest their content. This has impaired the performance of some of the sites we host for our customers. We’re doing our best to understand the problem, and to block the bots wherever we can, including using services like Cloudflare. … Read more
We’ve just pushed changes for Version 2.0 of The Museum Platform. This is quite a big release for us, and has been the culmination of several months’ work. Here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to… CIIM to version 7 The piece of software which sits under the hood of our collections online is … Read more
Platforms and Shebangs The “Platform” in “The Museum Platform” means, of course, that TMP can do the whole shebang*, from back-end to user interface, with the hosting and supporting services all taken care of. But maybe you don’t need the whole shebang but only a tasty slice of it (if that’s a thing). Well, a … Read more
It’s been a while but we’ve just now published our new “Museum Platform Overview” video. It focuses on storytelling and collections online and the tools we’re building to make this as accessible and easy as possible, even for non-technical staff. It’s on the homepage of our site but embedded below too – let us know … Read more
Enabling users to comment on object records is a fairly obvious idea, and one that many museums do already. We certainly get asked for it all the time. The technical issue that we had with TMP is that although collections records feel very much a part of WordPress (and a core part of our TMP … Read more
We’re a distributed team – not quite worldwide (yet!) but spread around the UK in Essex, Cornwall and Leeds. So when our mutual friend James Morley (who moved out of London recently to set up a very beautiful B&B in Dunster, near Minehead) offered to host us for a TMP away day, we jumped at … Read more
We’re always on the lookout for feature requests from clients that are more generic than specific to one particular site. When we spot these (for instance if several clients ask for Feature X) then we try to build these in a way that makes them available to everyone who uses the platform. This is, after … Read more
As ever, we’ve been super busy with the Platform since our last update. There are two main things to announce this time around: 1. We need your data! We’ve mentioned several times that we’ve been working proactively with the museum community as we develop the Platform. This is really important to us – we want … Read more
It’s been a while since I wrote that last (and, er, first) post on the Museum Platform blog. The lack of progress in writing anything here is at a total contrast to the breadth and depth of work we’ve been doing on the actual platform itself, and the business and structures that will support it. We … Read more