Spring 2026

Welcome, Spring! At our support office here in Pennsylvania, we are excited to see the beginning of warmer weather.

Inspired to do some spring cleaning, this edition includes a reminder about keeping the data and images on your site current, as well as a new newsletter segment. We're going to start highlighting an article from the PPO Knowledge Base that you may have missed in each edition. If you haven't checked out the Knowledge Base before, there's a great variety of tips and troubleshooting information available for PPO, for the PastPerfect 5.0 & PastPerfect 4.0 desktop software, and general information about PastPerfect and collections management.

When is the last time your PastPerfect Online site was updated? As of March 1st, 31.5% of PastPerfect Online sites haven't uploaded in the past 2 years!

Even if your organization isn't accepting new collections or planning to share additional records online, we recommend uploading data and images to your PPO site at least once per year. This ensures that any modified images, expanded descriptions, or corrected typos in your PastPerfect program are made available to your web visitors.

 "Updating Your PPO Site" is a 4-part video series that reviews the core steps of updating your site. Whether you need a reminder after focusing on other projects or are brand new to the process, you’ll be up to speed in less than 15 minutes! 

• Selecting Your Records to Go Online (3m 19s)
• Selecting Fields (3m 10s)
• Setting up Advanced Search (2m 39s)
• Creating and Uploading Files (4m 5s)

If you have any questions about how to create or upload files, our team is always happy to help by phone at 1-800-562-6080 or by email at pposupport@museumsoftware.com. You can find all videos on the PPO Training page.

Featured KB article: How do I upload or update just one record on my site?

There is no way to update or upload individual records to your site. The Create Web Publishing Files step in the Web Publishing Wizard generates new data files from scratch each time based on the records and fields that have been selected. You should always include all options #1-11 every time you create files. The Create process includes new records you have selected to be shared as well as updated information on records you are already sharing. In addition, any records where you have unchecked "Include in Web Export" will be excluded in the new web files. When you upload the newly created data to your site, it completely replaces the previously loaded data to ensure that everything is completely up to date.

However, you can save some time by creating and uploading selected image folders, as explained in the Related Article: My PPO upload takes too long. How can I make it quicker?

If you have only edited text content on the data records and haven't made any changes to the images that are being shared (edited in Image Management or added new ones to be shared), you can just create the data files (#1-11) and skip the images (#12).

We are asking each of our staff to choose a favorite item from one of the many online collections. Sara's pick is a photograph from the online collection of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC:

"Wellsboro is a small borough in North Central Pennsylvania, with a charming downtown where a lot of the original architecture still stands. Many of the original businesses are also still operating, including the 1920s movie theater, a diner from the 1930s, as well as a department store from the 1930s, and a hotel built in 1869. This photograph reminds me of the fond memories I have of walking along Main Street and shows both the theater and hotel. Although this photograph is from 1981, this view is nearly the same today."

Featured Sites

The West End Museum

Bandy Heritage Center

The Dot Experience

View more PastPerfect Online sites on our List of Collections page.

If your site is not listed and you would like to be, please let us know by sending an email with your organization name to pposupport@museumsoftware.com.