DrupalSouth 2022 day 2 wrap-up

Day 2

Day 2 was another busy Drupal day! We started with the keynote, Sarah-Jane Peterschlingmann (Managing Director and owner of ATech) talking about leading talented teams. She had some great insights around what makes talented people happy in an organisation. She also presented some questions you should be asking at an organisation-wide level to gauge happiness.

Using Drupal as a content store for Service NSW apps

By Michael Caddy

Michael provided some insights into Service NSW and its digital journey. Service NSW provides 1300 services, with many transactions now digital. It’s seen significant growth in the past 2-3 years and currently gets 4-7 millon site visitors per month.

The system uses Drupal 9 (was Drupal 7 but now Drupal 9) and also React, Java and APIs. It’s also heavily customised and partially decoupled. The site uses the Microcontent module (built by Previous Next) and also uses Workflow and Workbench for custom workflow.

Building QA Dashboards in Drupal

By Arijit Dutta, Srijan

Arijit presented a QA dashboard that aggregates:

• Security testing
• Performance testing
• Functional testing

The dashboard is an internal product (for Srijan). It highlights the power of a consolidated approach to testing, particularly having testing metrics to track each project and show project health.

A case study about location-based search on nsw.gov.au website

By Jibran Ijaz, NSW Customer Service

Jibran introduced NSW’s OneCX program, which is trying to consolidate NSW Government sites. In total, there are/were 750 NSW sites that could be consolidated. As part of this consolidation, the OneCX team has tackled the problem of location-based searching using different spatial concepts such as regions, local government authorities, suburbs, postcodes, etc.

The nsw.gov.au site uses Australia Post’s public dataset for geographic information for postcode and suburb. This data is used to tag content, allowing proximity search to work across various use cases.

Beyond plain language

By Diana Campbell, Oxide Interactive

Dianna started with a definition of content as being all the pixels that appear inside a frame (words, images, forms, etc.).

Key takeaways include:

• Bring content people into projects at the start
• Reduce word count — think of word count as ‘effort’ score (more words equals more effort)
• Remove FAQ pages — they’re often duplicating content
• Use a tool like Hemmingway to review text for readability
• Break up the page into manageable chunks using things like:
  • Summary text
  • Anchor links
  • Video
  • Call to action panels
  • Bullet points
  • Tables
  • Numbers and facts panels

Dianna also introduced the concept of user stories for content, especially when communicating complex processes. As an X I want to Y so that I can Z.

Building a secure, authenticated federal agency Drupal platform

By Julie Erben & Alex Skrypnyk

Julie and Alex spoke about a large project for a federal agency that can’t be named for security reasons. The project built a new, user-authenticated portal including a complete redesign.

Key project management takeaways covered:

• Carefully consider the content data model
• Ensure accessibility is dealt with early on
• Make sure stakeholders have truly considered the design
• Faceted search is hard — make sure you allow enough time and budget for it
• The right team is paramount

Key technical solutions included:

• A dedicated AWS account and managed Lagoon cluster
• A secure internet gateway and fully managed next-gen web application firewall (WAF)
• Nightly migration runs from scratch within a dedicated environment and migration validation process
• Nightly automated task to sanitise production database (GDPR Drupal module) and export it (using gdpr-mysqldump package) to AWS
• Initial migration of external 1.2TB of searchable content and assets and future-proofing to support 500GB data storage increase per year via storage in AWS OpenSearch
• Visual design based on CivicTheme component-based design system
• Secure analytics system with Matomo

Scanning the Australian Government ecosystem. How popular is Drupal down under?

By Sean Hamlin, amazee.io

Sean took us through some enlightening stats on CMS use for Australian government websites. He started by looking at states and then looked at federal government sites. Below we’ve included the Drupal % for each jurisdiction:

• VIC — 29.5% (includes SDP sites)
• NSW — 18.7%
• SA — 6.9%
• WA — 18.6%
• TAS — 3.8%
• QLD — 9.3%
• ACT — 12.9%
• NT — 18.2%
• Federal (excluding state-based sites) — 41.4% …with a nod to the head of GovCMS Sharyn Clarkson, who was in the second row

Averaging out these figures, 27.2% of government websites in Australia are built with Drupal. Or as Sean said: “Drupal powers over a quarter of the websites in Australian government.”

And in case you’re interested, the next top contender is Squiz, with 12.1% of government sites in Australia.

Sean also compared open source and proprietary systems:

• 41.6% proprietary
• 58.4% open source

That’s a wrap

We loved DrupalSouth but we’re all exhausted now! With such a long break between in-person events, we all need to get used to the pace of a busy conference (and socialising) so much. Having said that, bring on DrupalSouth 2023!