Sector(s)

Project Team

Organisations involved: 
Salsa Digital
Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner

Team members: 
Amit Singh — Engagement Manager
Kristen Pol — Technical Lead
Nathania Sudirman — Content Loading
John Cloys — Accessibility Consultant
Alex Skrypnyk — CivicTheme Consultant 

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

As we were one of the early adopters of CivicTheme, our team was able to contribute back to CivicTheme with bug fixes, enhancements and feedback.

The Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner (AEIC) Drupal 7 website was coming to End-of-Life. Salsa worked with the AEIC to build its new GovCMS Drupal 9/CivicTheme website. Salsa created a visually appealing website, delivered on time and well under budget (overall spend was just over $25K).

About the project

AEIC’s challenge

The Australian Energy Infrastructure Commissioner’s public-facing website was built on GovCMS Drupal 7, which was coming to End-of-Life. AEIC needed to build a new site on GovCMS Drupal 9.

Back to top

AEIC’s transformation — a GovCMS D9 website using CivicTheme

AEIC required a quick turnaround with minimal customisations. Salsa recommended using CivicTheme to build the new GovCMS Drupal 9 website. CivicTheme is an open source design system offering a rapid build option with lower costs. 

Salsa ran discovery workshops with AEIC, focusing on mapping the site requirements to CivicTheme. The site was built using out-of-the-box CivicTheme components. There was only one customisation, which was the implementation of the search functionality. 

As AEIC did not require any changes to the visual aspect of its site, and mostly CivicTheme out-of-the-box components were used, a designer was not required for this project. 

Salsa’s accessibility expert was engaged to ensure accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1) were met during the rebuild. 

The site was small at 30 pages, so content was migrated manually (rebuilding each page) rather than using any large-scale content migration tools. The project took less than 2 months to complete. 

AEIC was very happy with the final result — Salsa completed the rebuild with a rapid turnaround and spent less than 50% of the proposed budget. The remaining project funds were transferred to the Salsa Service Desk to cover ongoing future maintenance.

Salsa also provided training to AEIC content editors on how to use the CMS and CivicTheme components.

Back to top

The outcomes — an extremely cost-effective, visually appealing site

  • An extremely cost-effective website build (just over $25K, about 50% less than proposed budget)
  • A visually appealing site providing a better user experience
  • A fast website build
  • The benefits of the whole-of-government platform GovCMS, including open source code (no licensing fees), access to the GovCMS community, and a highly resilient and secure platform
     
Back to top

Why Drupal was chosen

GovCMS was chosen as a mature, whole-of-government Drupal solution. Drupal was chosen as the preferred CMS for Australia’s Federal Government through the creation of the GovCMS platform, which was launched in 2015. GovCMS is designed to make it easier for government agencies to create modern, affordable, responsive websites. Importantly, GovCMS provides a whole-of-government platform to help consolidation across government departments. The fact that Drupal is open source means there are no expensive lock-in contracts, and GovCMS can build a Drupal/GovCMS community. 

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

  • CivicTheme was chosen due to its flexible component-based design and ease of implementation.
  • GovCMS was chosen due to its reliable and secure platform for Australian government organisations.
  • The numerous security-related modules were installed and configured to ensure the website is as secure as possible.