Project Team

Other organisations involved: 

Governor of Victoria

Team members:

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

As a pilot site, many of the learnings were fed back into the development and refinement of Victoria’s Single Digital Presence.

Salsa Digital created and launched the Governor of Victoria website, a pilot site in Victoria’s whole-of-government digital platform, Single Digital Presence.

About the project

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DPC’s challenge

DPC needed pilot sites that could be built as part of the SDP project, with work from the sites then being re-used and key learnings folded into the project methodology. The Governor of Victoria website was chosen as one of the pilots because it:

  • Was in need of a major content update/rewrite
  • Had a highly responsive team, ready to create new content and a new site
  • Was built on an out-of-date Joomla CMS (and was therefore potentially prone to security risks)
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DPC’s transformation

As a completely independent site within the new SDP model (with unique needs), much of the frontend was customised. The visual design was led by DPC, starting with wireframes before progressing to user testing and then high-fidelity designs. Salsa Digital’s frontend themer worked with the DPC/Governor project team to write the code to translate the visual designs into web pages. Salsa Digital and DPC also worked together on the backend configuration.

A true pilot/test site, governor.vic.gov.au, was a great way to start ‘experimenting’ as Salsa Digital built SDP back in 2018. Drupal distribution Tide, created for this pilot site, was then used as the base for the first/main website on the new SDP platform, vic.gov.au. Tide had a lot of functionality implemented and covered by automated tests, so re-using it for an alpha version of vic.gov.au was a predictable and reliable process.

The Governor of Victoria website was built on the new open source platform Bay and formed a key part of the Bay component of the project. In fact, the completion of this website and the other pilot site for the Department of Treasury and Finance marked the completion of the Bay product in the SDP project. 

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The outcomes

  • A new site with new content 
  • An easy-to-use content management system (CMS)
  • A responsive site that can be viewed on desktops, tablets or smartphones
  • A better citizen-experience through improved content, visual design and user interface
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Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal is the CMS of choice for the Victorian Government in Australia. In 2018, Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet and Salsa Digital built a headless Drupal instance as part of a new open source, whole-of-government platform, Single Digital Presence. Drupal was chosen as the CMS and is being used to drive consolidation and an open source community within the Victorian Government. Single Digital Presence consists of three products — Bay (an open-source platform based on Lagoon), Tide (a Drupal CMS distribution) and Ripple coupled with Nuxt (the frontend presentation layer).

Image of https://www.governor.vic.gov.au/ homepage bordered with a tablet look and feel

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Single Digital Presence was chosen as a whole-of-government solution that aims to consolidate government websites across the state of Victoria in Australia. We also used the Mailchimp Module for Mailchimp integration with Drupal, to ensure the client’s existing newsletter and processes were integrated with the new site.

Image of https://www.governor.vic.gov.au/ bordered with a tablet look and feel