Sector(s)

Project Team

Other organisations involved: 

National Health Funding Body

Team members: 

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Salsa Digital rebuilt all the required frontend and backend components for publichospitalfunding.gov.au in GovCMS Drupal 8. We then migrated the content (over 165,000 pages/files) onto the new site. The site is now ready for GovCMS’s automatic migration to D9 in 2021.

About the project

Back to top

NHFB’s challenge

With Drupal 7 coming to end-of-life, support for GovCMS D7 SaaS was due to end in November 2021. NHFB needed to transition to GovCMS Drupal 9 (GovCMS D9) before the November deadline.

Back to top

NHFB’s transformation

Salsa Digital recommended NHFB migrate its site to GovCMS Drupal 8 as step 1 in a two-step process, with GovCMS taking care of all D8 to D9 migrations in 2021 (step 2). This approach allowed NHFB to migrate its site sooner and with reduced risks. We rebuilt the whole site in GovCMS D8, including updating and integrating a custom data conversion tool. 

The site had over 165,000 pages/files, including nearly 145,000 report pages. These report pages were very important because they’re a key function of the NHFB and essential for providing transparency of public hospital funding, payments and activities.

The GovCMS D7 site used a custom data conversion tool hosted on a third-party platform, which pulled raw data from data.gov.au and converted it into standardised reports. Salsa Digital needed to re-architect the solution with minimal costs to support GovCMS 8/9.  However, there was no technical documentation for the tool. 

We analysed the tool, upgraded the code to meet Drupal 8 standards, and then migrated the tool onto GovCMS8. Updating the tool and consolidating it onto the same platform has delivered many benefits, including:

  • A simpler overall architecture
  • Faster data conversion and reporting
  • Reduced costs with less servers and support (one platform instead of two)
Back to top

The outcomes

  • Technical strategy to supplement the broader NHFB team
  • Migration to GovCMS Drupal 8 for an easier pathway to GovCMS D9
  • Upgrade and integration of data conversion tool with faster reporting
  • Reduced overall ongoing costs for the website
Back to top

Why Drupal was chosen

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 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:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

GovCMS: The sites were already on GovCMS, a mature, Drupal-based platform.

The website was built in Drupal 7 and had a frontend integration to display combined data from data.gov.au and locally calculated report data. Salsa Digital upgraded the site to Drupal 9 and rebuilt the Rest API integration. We also optimised a previously built conversion script that was set up in a different system, integrating it into GovCMS. To achieve this challenging task, we used the Drupal migrate modules.