The brief for Sea Your History was deceptively simple: make 50,000 maritime heritage records searchable by the public. The complication arrived in the second sentence — “by the public” meant schoolchildren looking for a tall ship, and it also meant archive researchers needing vessel type, flag, era, and port of registry in the same query.
Those are two very different information needs. We decided early on that we weren’t going to build two interfaces. We’d build one, and make it progressive.
The progressive disclosure approach
The landing experience is a single search box with a large placeholder: “Search by vessel name, port, or year.” No facets. No dropdowns. Just the search. For the casual visitor, that’s all they need.
Results come back in a card grid — image if we have one, vessel name, type, and date range. Clicking a card opens the full record with all metadata fields. For researchers, a “Filters” toggle expands the full faceted search panel: vessel type, flag, era, port of registry, record source.
The filters live in the URL as query parameters, so researchers can bookmark and share specific filtered views — something that matters enormously for collaborative archival work.
What the gallery proved
One of the things we built into the record detail view was a media gallery — digitised photographs, crew manifests, port clearance certificates. Three columns, native lightbox, no plugin.
The gallery block in a proper FSE theme just works. No workarounds, no custom JS. Three columns, images crop to uniform height, click opens the lightbox overlay with prev/next navigation. That’s WP 7.0 doing its job.