Museums: curators publish without developers

An exhibition opens on Friday, and the website should not need a developer on Thursday

The problem

Programmes, opening hours and gallery texts for a cultural institution change on the institution's own schedule, which is often faster than the website's release cycle can keep up with. A curator finalises a label or an opening time and then waits for a development queue to catch up, and every small edit stuck behind that queue makes the institution look slower and less current than the exhibition actually is.

The usual answer

Institutions cope by batching changes into scheduled releases, which reduces how often the development team gets interrupted and means anything that misses the batch waits for the next one. Some maintain a workaround where a staff member with just enough technical access makes small edits directly in the CMS, which works until that person is unavailable or the edit is more complex than the workaround was built for.

How we approach it

We hand curators drafting, scheduling and approval in the platform itself, so publishing a change does not require a developer at all. A curator writes and previews the update, an internal approval step catches anything that needs sign-off before it goes live, and the whole cycle happens on the institution's own schedule rather than a development team's. What used to be a ticket in a queue becomes something the person who wrote the copy can publish themselves.

What changes

The person who wrote the label copy is the person who publishes it. The site reflects what is actually happening at the venue on the day it changes, and the institution stops looking closed for the days its website was simply waiting its turn.