Sector(s)

Project Team

Other organisations involved: 

Victorian Department of Health

Team members: 

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

The project included several contributions to Single Digital Presence, including:

  • A contacts module - to add contact information in the right sidebar (below the side menu)
  • A new, more flexible footer option that isn’t tied to the main menu
  • A sidebar links module - to add links into the right sidebar (below the side menu)
  • A new news content type
  • A table of contents in the site map to highlight top-tier items

Salsa Digital migrated the large health.vic.gov.au onto Victoria’s Single Digital Presence (SDP) to access the benefits of open source and the whole-of-government platform. The project represents a very large site with over 110 different features identified for rebuilding on SDP, and over 80,000 content objects (pages, documents and components) for migration.

About the project

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DH’s challenge

The Victorian Department of Health’s health.vic.gov.au was built on an old version of the proprietary content management system (CMS) SiteCore. The cost to upgrade, support and maintain the website was prohibitive, and the department was seeking a robust, functional, cost-effective platform to replace Sitecore.  

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DH’s transformation

Salsa Digital started with a thorough discovery process, mapping the Health website’s SiteCore features and components to SDP’s Tide (headless Drupal) and Ripple (SDP’s design system).  We ended up with a total of over 110 features identified as MVP. 

These were then converted into Jira user stories, with most features having three stories:

  • A backend story (to configure Drupal/Tide)
  • A frontend story (to  theme Ripple components) 
  • A migration story for the content migration from SiteCore into the new SDP feature/page

Where possible, we aligned with out-of-the-box solutions to avoid customisation and follow a whole-of-government approach.

For the migration, we used Merlin (the tool we created and open sourced).  Merlin significantly reduces costs compared to traditional migration methods.  

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The outcomes

  • Quick and easy site migration at reduced costs
  • Predictable, repeatable, automated content migrations with zero content freezes
  • Lower total cost of ownership
  • Replatforming to a highly secure, whole-of-government platform
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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).

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.