Sector(s)

Project Team

Other organisations involved:

Western Australia Department of Premier and Cabinet

Team member:

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Organizations Involved

Salsa Digital worked with Western Australia's Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) on a series of projects to deliver new Drupal features (pandemic alerts, public consultations and a service centre locator) and updates to the content management experience on wa.gov.au.

About the project

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WA Government’s challenge

The WA Government had three critical features it needed to introduce onto its platform quickly — to be run as separate projects. The three features were:

  1. The ability to quickly add important messages about COVID-19 to its suite of websites through an API-driven banner feature

  2. To create a location feature on the WA Government portal wa.gov.au that allowed users to easily see their nearest ServiceWA centres, including a map and centre details

  3. To create a new public consultation feature for wa.gov.au that would use APIs to consolidate and centralise different WA agency public consultations

A fourth project focused on the challenges of consolidation. As more agencies were onboarding to wa.gov.au, limitations in the platform's ability to manage data at scale were uncovered, and DPC was getting more requests for additional features.

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WA Government’s transformation

Pandemic alerts

Salsa Digital built an API-driven Drupal alerts module for the WA Government so it could consolidate alert messages and automate banner notifications for its suite of websites. View case study

Service centre locator

Salsa Digital built WA’s service centre location feature to create a personalised, location-based experience for WA citizens. View case study

We later completed a phase 2, creating an even more personalised location service. View case study

Public consultations

Salsa Digital built a public consultation solution to capture and manage consultations along with a consultation listing feature on wa.gov.au, with API capability for new consultations from external sources. View case study

Additional features

WA DPC had a backlog of feature requests from participating agencies and internal platform stakeholders. WA DPC identified the top eight areas to deliver a more scalable platform for agencies and provide richer citizen experiences. Salsa Digital worked with WA DPC to scope and validate these areas using a series of rapid prototypes. With concepts validated, we moved to developing production versions of the enhancements.

The eight areas were:

  • Annual report
  • CMS layouts
  • Document collection
  • Document management
  • Group security
  • Page index
  • Public service taxonomy
  • Quick exit

View case study

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The outcomes

  • A flexible alert information banner that can be colour-coded to communicate critically
  • Enabling WA citizens to find services in their area easily
  • A consolidated list of public consultations so WA citizens can engage with governments in one place, with the ability to search and filter consultations
  • A more coherent model to manage document access and versioning
  • The ability to manage content across agency boundaries without system-imposed technical constraints
  • Improved content management experience
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Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal is the CMS of choice for the Western Australian (WA) Government. Drupal was chosen because it’s open source, secure, extensible and was the best platform for WA's needs. Drupal also offers governments a highly adopted, easy-to-use CMS with an active community and lots of features.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

New custom modules were used to deliver most of the new functionality. The above community-contributed modules were used as follows:

  1. Media Revisions UI - an ability to manage media revisions was introduced, and this module provides a UI to manage those revisions.
  2. TOC API - this module provides a useful API to process and create a Table of Contents from page headings. We built a custom module that utilises this API to provide a user-managed Table of Contents feature.