Detroit Historical Society
A Drupal 10 website showcasing the exhibits, programs, and collections of a non-profit museum.
Client Overview
The Detroit Historical Society manages two cultural institutions in Detroit: the Detroit Historical Museum and the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. Their mission is to preserve and share the city’s history through exhibits, live programs and tours, oral histories, and access to an extensive artifact collection of over 50,000 items.
The Challenge
The Society was maintaining five different websites across Drupal 7, WordPress, Omeka, and PastPerfect. This fragmented setup made content hard to manage, disconnected visitors from key resources, and left them vulnerable as Drupal 7 reached end-of-life.
The Solution
Zengenuity designed and built a new Drupal 10 website that consolidated all five platforms into one modern, integrated system..
Key Features
- Custom Design with Drag-and-Drop Page Building: A complete redesign gave the site a modern, mobile-friendly look that better reflects the Society’s mission. The design balances flexibility for special exhibits with consistency for core pages, ensuring a polished public experience. The site uses Mercury Editor for easy drag-and-drop editing.
- Complex Content Migrations: We migrated thousands of pages, oral histories, and exhibit materials from Drupal 7, WordPress, and Omeka into Drupal 10. Content was transformed using custom migration plugins to conform to the requirements of the Paragraphs and Mercury Editor modules on the site.
- Collections Integration: We developed a custom importer for PastPerfect, enabling both the initial migration of over 50,000 artifact records and ongoing updates by museum staff as new items are catalogued.
- Advanced Search: We implemented Drupal’s Search API for two levels of discovery—a global sitewide search and a specialized collection search with metadata filtering.
- Media Management: We centralized the handling of images, video, and audio through Drupal’s media library for reusability across exhibits, blogs, and event pages.
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The Results
The new website is a complete transformation of how the Society presents itself online. The redesigned interface provides visitors with a clean, modern experience that makes it easier to explore exhibits, oral histories, and collections.
For staff, the editing tools have sparked renewed energy in updating and expanding content. Pages are easier to build, more visually engaging, and better aligned with the Society’s brand. The new design, combined with flexible templates, makes content creation feel less like a chore and more like a creative opportunity.
By consolidating five separate platforms into one, the Society not only reduced maintenance overhead but also improved discoverability. Artifact records that were once hidden in a siloed collections database now live under the main domain, boosting search engine visibility and drawing in new audiences.
- Improved Public Access: Visitors can now find exhibits, oral histories, and collections all in one place.
- Editorial Efficiency: Staff enjoy a modern editing experience that encourages updating and enhancing content.
- SEO Impact: More than 50,000 artifact pages now live under the Society’s primary domain, significantly boosting long-tail search visibility and driving new audiences to the site.
- Sustainability: The site is built on Drupal 10 with ongoing maintenance, ensuring security and future-ready functionality.
Deliverables & Features
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