Free admission to Hamburg's museums. A website for the free museum day.
On Reformation Day, numerous Hamburg museums and exhibition venues offer free admission. The website brings together all participating venues, programmes and information for the free museum day.
We have provided technical support for the platform since 2023. It runs in the same TYPO3 installation as the Long Night of Museums.
Two events, one shared core.
seeforfree and the Long Night of Museums have similar technical requirements. Both platforms manage participating venues, events, opening hours and other information as structured data records.
When upgrading to TYPO3 12, we merged the two websites into one shared TYPO3 installation. Since then, we have applied security updates and version upgrades once for both. Improvements can be carried over from one website to the other – in 2025, for example, the Long Night's revised personal tour planning.
Content, editorial access and design remain separate.
Preparing the next edition.
Preparations for the next free museum day begin in the summer. We get the existing website ready for the new year so that the participating venues can update their content.
Wrap up the previous year
We carry the museum pages over into the new year, hide the previous edition and adjust year references such as the date in the tour planner.
Get the editors ready
We set up accounts for the participating venues or adjust existing ones. The museums maintain their information using the input forms provided.
Update the design
We add Museumsdienst's new key visual to the header. We prepare new cover photos of the museums in the required image formats and add them to the museum pages.
Check and publish content
The new edition remains hidden until all information has been entered, approved by the venues and checked by Museumsdienst. On the date agreed with Museumsdienst, we publish the new edition.
Prepare for higher traffic
For the day of the event, the hosting provider temporarily provides a server with more capacity. We oversee the move there and back and adapt the website to the new server environment each time. If necessary, shortly before the event we also hide the museum suggestions at the bottom of the page (“Schon entdeckt?”): they are loaded via a separate server request, so the pages load faster without them.
Search, find, plan a tour.
Each museum maintains its own information.
The participating venues edit their information themselves. The input forms specify which information is required and in what form it is stored.
Guidance notes and mandatory fields help the editors with tasks such as image descriptions. Once its entries are complete, each venue releases its information to Museumsdienst Hamburg. Museumsdienst checks the content; any later changes go through Museumsdienst.
This allows the venues to update their information directly in the system, and Museumsdienst does not have to copy it onto the website from spreadsheets or emails.
Make access easier, document the status.
Information in Easy Language and German Sign Language can be reached directly from the header. The website also lets users adjust the font size and navigate by keyboard.
The technical implementation was checked for barriers. The documented status and known limitations are set out in the publicly available accessibility statement.
The project in numbers.
How we help with similar projects.
Combine several websites where it makes sense?
If websites have similar technical requirements, not every platform needs to be built entirely separately. We look at which components can be run together and where a clear separation is still needed.
