The Smart Museum of Art is the University of Chicago’s art museum, always free and open to the public, with a program that runs from major contemporary exhibitions to course-driven research with faculty and students. Its previous website, built on a legacy Craft CMS, had become difficult for staff to update and hard for visitors to navigate. Cuberis rebuilt the site on a flexible WordPress framework and migrated decades of content along the way: nearly 280 exhibitions, more than 700 events, 73 publications, and the museum’s Public Practice projects. The new site puts what is on view and what is happening next front and center, gives researchers a browsable archive of past exhibitions, and lets the Smart’s team build and update pages on their own with a library of ready-made components.
Project Highlights:
- Full migration from a legacy Craft CMS onto WordPress
- Nearly 280 exhibitions, 700+ events, and 73 publications carried over
- Events calendar filterable by event type, month, and year
- Browsable archive of past exhibitions by year
- Curated collection highlights linked to the online collection database
- Reorganized navigation around Visit, Art, Events, Learn & Research, and Join & Give
- Accessibility review and remediation of menus, forms, and page structure
- Flexible low code / no code framework for staff-managed updates