Sector(s)

Team Members

reecemarsland, hannah mcdermott, psebborn, vinnycustodio, will_richards

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Community contributions

As part of the project, we contributed to several bug fixes including: 
https://www.drupal.org/project/localgov/issues/3194970
https://www.drupal.org/project/localgov/issues/3180940

There are also elements that we are looking to package and contribute to the distribution:

  • Major works: allow the publishing of various construction and restoration projects, taggable by neighbourhoods and can be looked up by individual neighbourhood
  • City save: Saving schemes promoted by the council that might be transferable to other councils using the distribution.

We also overhauled the LocalGov guides navigation system to make it applicable and themable to a wider set of content types.

Westminster City Council is the local authority for the City of Westminster in Greater London, England. Westminster extends from the River Thames to Oxford Street has many visitor attractions and historic landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster (the home of the UK Parliament), Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Cathedral and much of the West End shopping and entertainment district.

Westminster City Council required a new website that would provide:

  • direct and rapid access to information
  • dedicated user journeys for business users
  • the ability to support campaigns without distracting from the main goals of the website
  • a visual design that reflects the council brand but with an inclusive community feel
  • improved accessibility

About the project

There we several goals of the new website:

  • deliver a user centered, modern design that reflects the council branding but that also creates an inclusive community feel
  • improve the accessibility of the website to achieve a minimum of WGAC 2.1 AA standard
  • provide easy, direct access to council services through structured organisation of content
  • create dedicated user journeys for business users
  • enable content editors to publish compelling campaign content

Adhering to the GDS digital service standard, Zoocha undertook an alpha phase to design and test solutions for the requirements that had been identified during discovery. Following the alpha, the beta phase then focused on refining those solutions and building the full platform using LocalGov Drupal.

Whilst the LocalGov Drupal distribution provides a well developed set of core features ‘out of the box’, it was necessary to extend some aspects of functionality such as events and services features to meet the needs of the council.

Several new features were also developed (major works, components, content review workflow) which we intend to contribute back to the LocalGov Drupal project.

Alasdair Maclean, Web Project Manager at Westminster City Council commented:

Zoocha took on a complex and sometimes self-contradictory set of requirements and a punishing timeline confidently and with a minimum of fuss. They were as excited as we were about the opportunities LocalGov Drupal offered and fully entered into the democratic spirit of the project. They worked in a truly agile way and delivered beyond our specifications.
 

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal and in particular, the LocalGov Drupal distribution was selected jointly by Westminster City Council and Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea as part of their shared services arrangement.

LocalGov Drupal

LocalGov Drupal is an open source collaboration between UK councils and Drupal specialists like Zoocha with the aim of reducing the cost and increasing the speed and agility of local government digital publishing.

LocalGov Drupal is funded by the Local Digital Collaboration Unit, part of the UK Government Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and is being contributed to and used by local councils including Brighton & Hove, Croydon, Cumbria and Waltham Forest.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

LocalGov Drupal

The LocalGov Drupal distribution was used as the foundation for the platform and in particular for:

  • Guide pages
  • Events
  • Directories
  • Alert Banners
  • Services + Service statuses

Message, Message Notify, Workflows, Scheduler

  • Content approval workflows
  • Content Scheduling for future publishing, unpublishing + archiving.
  • Messages used to email the appropriate users when content changed state - ‘needs review’, ‘published’, ‘archive warning’, ‘approved for publishing’

Mirgrate Suite of Modules

  • Large migration of other 400 webforms
  • 1000s of submissions including files migrated
  • Forms varied from simple to complex with conditional fields and conditional emails
  • The suite of modules enabled us to write the migration without too much custom logic.

Paragraphs

  • Westminsters editorial team needs a lot of flexibility in how content is displayed, including overriding individual displays on a per page basis, for example changing from latest events to featured events.
  • The paragraphs module meant we could write this functionality once, and reuse it in many components.
  • Also gave a lot of control over page layouts generally, and allowed easy variation in how each component could be displayed
Back to top
Westminster City Council Webform
Westminster City Council Mobile