Sector(s)
Project Team
Other organisations involved:
Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel’s (OCPC)
Team members:
- Jim Tasevski - Engagement Manager
- Awang Setyawan - Senior Backend Drupal Developer
- Sonny Kieu - Senior Backend Drupal Developer
- Govind Maloo - Senior Backend Drupal Developer
- Stuart Rowlands - Solution Architect & Content Migration
- Sami Ullah - QA
Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
Elements of the complex listing page were contributed back to Victoria’s Ripple Design System
Salsa Digital migrated the large (88,000 documents) and complex legislation.vic.gov.au from Lotus Notes to Victoria’s whole-of-government digital platform, Single Digital Presence (SDP), using the open source migration tool, Merlin. The new site provides greater transparency and access to laws considered and passed by Parliament.
About the project
Office of the Chief Parliamentary Counsel’s (OCPC) challenge
Legislation.vic.gov.au was running on outdated proprietary software, Lotus Notes. The site wasn’t user-friendly, wasn’t responsive on mobile and had a number of other limitations.
Back to topOCPC’s transformation — customised site with easy migration
OCPC started with a thorough design process, focusing on human-centered design led by DPC. You can find out about this process in the Medium blog written by DPC’s designer, Duncan Legge.
The project then moved into technical discovery. With part of this process already done by DPC’s business analyst, Salsa Digital took the functional specification and translated it into JIRA tickets and sprints as part of our standard agile process.
Salsa worked closely with DPC’s frontend developer to create a new content format/presentation in Victoria’s Single Digital Presence. The site is a highly customised instance of Single Digital Presence, requiring new structures to accommodate the different types of content in terms of both formatting and the content’s lifecycle. This involved customising the backend, creating new content structures and customising or creating new frontend components.
Some of these components were contributed back to Ripple, Single Digital Presence’s frontend design system. For example, a complex listing page was created with multiple rows and multiple columns to capture the necessary information of Acts, Statutory Rules and Bills.
In terms of the migration process itself, this was also a large and complex migration with over 11,000 complex records pages and over 88,000 documents migrated. Despite complex content formats and types, Salsa Digital was able to automate the migration using Salsa Digital’s migration tool, Merlin. Merlin scrapes the content and data and transforms it into structured content/data on the target platform.
Back to topThe outcomes — improved website on SDP
Some of the benefits for site users and the OCPC include:
- Legislation.vic.gov.au is now responsive to mobile — this is very important because it allows one of the main user groups, lawyers, to access the site from their phones when in court
- More user-friendly site for visitors
- Clearer listing pages for users
- Improved site functionality and new site features
- More user-friendly experience for content editors
- Moving from outdated proprietary software to a cutting-edge, fully open source platform
- Access to the many benefits of Victoria's whole-of-government digital platform, Single Digital Presence, including extensive support, user-tested components, and a growing community
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:
Single Digital Presence was used because it’s a whole-of-government solution that aims to consolidate government websites across the state of Victoria in Australia.
