Like with finance ministries across the world, MoF Somalia is responsible for government expenditure, revenue raising, preparing annual budgets, economic policies among other responsibilities.
An ineffective CMS in place with unstructured data, MoF Somalia was looking for a technology partner which would help them both present their website with a clean architecture and design while also catering to the global audience.
Drupal’s reputation as a pro-government, content savvy and cost-effective CMS made it an obvious choice.
About the project
The primary goal was to restructure the website so as to incorporate all the new content types, with a user-friendly navigation, add a custom content type of publication to publish annual reports.
The project was executed using the agile project methodology in less than 6 weeks of development time.
Since Somali wasn’t part of the 94 languages added in the Drupal 8, it was added using flexible multilingual infrastructure in Drupal 8.
The website aims to provide flexibility for content editors. The result is a modern and user-friendly communication between citizens and authorities.
The user interface was enhanced with a powerful site-wide faceted search and advanced text search capabilities. This was especially important for Publication - a content type - which contained the documents, pdf of the summary of meeting discussions.
The website was also optimised for high performance and better search engine rankings with a carefully drafted audit report. Drupal features for performance were optimized with caching, aggregating and Minifying the CSS and JS, The images and reports on the website were compressed as well.
Outcome
The project was completed in 6 weeks.
The new MoF, Somalia website is a lot user-friendly with faceted search application feature and loads in lesser time than before. With a more structured architecture, MoFSomalia was not only better organized but SEO friendly too.
Why Drupal was chosen
With a restricted budget and stakes for creating a deep relationship with its citizens, choosing the right CMS was a critical decision. Standing true to the principles of responsible governance, the MoF Somalia planned to make a multilingual, accessible website which also offered content in a structured manner.
Drupal was chosen for the following reasons:
- Cost-effective
- Multilingual
- WCAG compliant
- Structured presentation of data
- Different content types
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
To build a custom language, all the language modules were added These modules were used to achieve the goals.
Since a multilingual website was a basic requirement for Ministry of Finance, the multilingual modules were a must.
Standard performance modules such as advanced CSS, JS aggregation were used to ensure the website remained optimized.
Search API was another important feature which was used to find results in the publication page.
