A comprehensive was needed by Westaf to import, assimilate and publish works of Art generated from multiple sources and provide a fast and multidimensional search facility for the same. Hierarchical and Granular access control was needed for different actions on the various Art objects. Categorization of the Artworks using Getty Vocabularies viz. AAT and TGN was needed.
After reviewing the specifications and requirements we brainstormed over using the raw Zend Framework or Drupal. We needed to use Zend Framework for the hierarchical ACL functionality in any case so decided to use Drupal as the application platform with ACL provided by Zend ACL objects. Drupal was the primary platform due to the support for complex data structure storage (cck + field group + content multigroup), Apache Solr support and a rich set of jquery based modules.
Drupal provided the entire framework starting from import of Art from 3rd party sources to storage as CCK content types and an effective Apache Solr search platform for searching the content. Google Mapping is used extensively for locating the Artworks and using proximity searches too. CCK's and it's Contrib modules including the new Content Multigroup was used for storage of Artworks. Taxnonomy/Taxonomy Manager and a custom coded List Manager was used to manage various taxonomies used by different parts of the Artworks CCK object. Apache Solr using Tomcat as the servlet container was used for faceted search. Google Maps was used in the faceted search result set to provide a sense of proximity to the searched results.