The Single Digital Presence Project
The SDP project covered implementing a Drupal distribution to build the main site at , site sections and providing/sharing content for semi-independent sites. Semi-independent sites are the other sites that have their content centrally managed.
Digital teams and agencies can also build fully independent sites using the SDP products but not sharing content with the the main vic.gov.au site. Fully independent sites are completely separate installations of the whole distribution. Fully independent sites can use Bay, Tide and Ripple to build a site using the same headless Drupal backend for the content repository with the Vue.js frontend. Fully independent sites can also use the API to build different frontend frameworks that consume data from the content repository (Drupal backend) or can build a theme directly in Drupal if a headless solution is not desired.
Benefits to Victorian government agencies
With a ready-made platform, agencies will be able to:
- Reduce costs
- Focus resources and budgets on innovation instead of duplication
- Share and re-use features across agencies
- Access a central repository of content — write content once and re-use it
- Access an easy-to-use website solution
- Create websites in a secure environment that’s managed by DPC
Benefits for Victorian citizens
SDP will deliver the following benefits to Victorian citizens:
- Centralised content that enables a ‘joined up’ user journey
- A consistent design and user experience across different websites
- Content that’s readily viewed on smartphones and tablets
- A citizen-centric website experience
- A generally improved online experience, including content written in plain English
About Single Digital Presence (SDP)
Single Digital Presence (SDP) has three main products that DPC has named Bay, Tide and Ripple. These three products can be used by Victorian Government agencies as a complete package or separately.
Bay is the platform itself, it forms the infrastructure layer on which SDP has been built. Salsa and our partner built Bay using open-source platform, . This cloud-based solution allows Victorian Government agencies to build, test and deliver websites via the cloud. More about Bay.
Tide is the Drupal distribution that manages content. It’s a customised build of Drupal 8, purpose-built to serve Victorian Government information. It forms a central repository where all content can be managed. Importantly, Tide allows content sharing — one source of content that can then be ‘served’ to different sites. More about Tide.
Ripple is a library of components that delivers a consistent look and feel across government websites to increase usability and ensure WCAG 2.0 AA compliance. It’s built on Vue.js and Nuxt. More about Ripple.
Single Digital Presence (SDP) is:
- Fully open source
- Flexible
- Delivers on accessibility requirements
- Responsive, so websites can be viewed on desktops, tablets and smartphones
- Secure
- Supported (by DPC and Salsa)
As a fully open source platform, Victorian Government agencies will be able to leverage the frontend and CMS products once they’re available. This will make it easy for digital teams and agencies that service Victorian Government to use all or part of what they build. This will reduce costs and the time it takes to build new websites.
Under open source licenses the code for Bay, Tide and Ripple is free to use. Costs will be incurred for third-party services including hosting, implementation and support tooling.
