South Carolina State Museum

Client Background

The South Carolina State Museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate and the largest museum in the state. The site serves diverse audiences including educators, families, researchers, members, and visitors interested in exhibits, events, and collection objects. The digital platform needed to be flexible, scalable, accessible, and easy for staff to maintain.

Project Context

This project was delivered by the Interactive Knowledge development team as a full Drupal 11 rebuild. It includes a custom theme, custom modules, a complex content model, and an integration with the museum’s EMu collections database. The site supports thousands of items across exhibitions, events, collection objects, online exhibits, school resources, and more.

My Role and Contributions

I contributed to development and support across several areas of the project, including:

• Front end updates and SCSS styling for templates, layouts, and component visibility
• Drupal configuration work including content types, fields, and editorial workflows
• Debugging issues across custom modules such as scsm_base and scsm_hours
• Template and theme refinements in the custom ik_client theme
• Search adjustments related to Apache Solr indexing and facets
• Fixes for meeting minutes, events, and publication pages
• Support for content moderation and permissions configuration
• Cross environment testing using Lando and Pantheon workflows
• General maintenance, bug fixes, and UX polish across the site

My work helped maintain reliability and usability in a very large content system used by a significant museum team.

Key Features

• Event listings, exhibitions, and program pages with flexible layouts
• Online exhibitions built with custom paragraph types
• EMu based collection objects with synced data and imagery
• Advanced search powered by Apache Solr
• Dynamic museum hours with holiday exceptions
• Mega menu navigation system
• Fully responsive theme built on Bootstrap 5
• Spanish language landing and navigational support

Challenges and Solutions

High volume content architecture

The site uses more than 15 content types and 30 paragraph types. I worked with configuration and templating adjustments that improved editor workflows and front end rendering.

Collection object integration

The EMu API sync creates very large sets of data. I supported debugging around collection object displays, sorting, and taxonomy mapping.

Complex editorial roles

The museum uses several roles and workflow states. I helped troubleshoot permissions, moderation issues, and access control logic.

Meeting minutes and sortable PDF lists

I implemented and fixed views based lists for museum commission minutes and board materials, including custom sorting, icon display, and PDF rendering behavior.

Front end inconsistencies across templates

I updated SCSS and theme templates to fix spacing, image handling, responsiveness, and accessibility across the site.

Deployment and Testing

• Local development with Lando
• Pantheon multidev environments for safe testing
• Configuration export, import, and config split workflows
• Browser and device testing for event listings, exhibitions, and navigation
• Performance checks with Solr and Drupal’s caching layers

Results

• A stable, accessible, and modernized museum website
• Flexible layouts that allow editors to build pages without technical help
• Strong search and discovery tools for collections and exhibits
• A reliable foundation for long term museum content growth
• Improved consistency across templates and interactive features

Value Added

• Usable and maintainable Drupal theme
• A content model that supports exhibitions, events, collections, and online programming
• Accessible pages that meet modern standards
• Scalable infrastructure on Pantheon
• Improved editor workflows and clarity in content management