CA (Collective Access) is a very popular application for large museum and archive collections. It was developed by Whirl-i-Gig, but is a free product. The app is great, but it has two main problems: it requires a high degree of technical expertise to get it up and running; and the documentation is extensive, but more “what it is” vs. “how do I do it?”.
There’s essentially no front end for developers. There’s no drag and drop anything for development. And no live preview of the browser view. The HTML is buried in PHP code, so you’re going to have to embed it in the PHP code and touch it up with CSS. This is what I meant when I said you need to be pretty technical to even install it, let alone” “dress it up.”
There’s no WordPress-like interface, and you have to install it on your own server or a VPS, because you need root access. And since it was developed in PHP, you need to be comfortable with PHP, CSS, HTML, Linux CLI, SSH, etc. There is a forum at https://collectiveaccess.org/support/index.php?p=/discussions, but good luck on getting an answer. Your question might get a lot of views, but very rarely will you get an answer, in my experience. It’s nowhere near as responsive as Reddit or StackOverflow.
So, users beware. If you have a technical team, you’re good to go. But, if you’re used to a WordPress-like install, where you can just tell a non-CA developer what you want, you should think again. And even after you get it installed, and you want to make modifications without a developer, you’re going to be out of luck.
Since I have overcome numerous problems, most caused by the lack of technical and user documentation, I’m going to attempt to guide you through the process-especially importing data.