Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Ben Lamptey
Miles Lemon
We launched a new corporate site for the City of Wolverhampton Council in February 2019, replacing a legacy system, that was not fit for purpose. This new site was developed in Drupal 8 over a four-month period using an Agile delivery methodology and fortnightly development sprints. The project included migrating approximately 8,000 pages of content from a .net solution into Drupal along with associated URL redirects, and implementing a new design, which is fully responsive across all devices. This project is part of a three-year council wide transformation programme to centralise customer contact, identifying all transactional services that deliver a unified digital customer experience for end users.
About the project
The site also includes a single sign-on authentication layer, using Microsoft ADFS and the `simpleSAMLphp authentication` Drupal module along with a custom PHP library (https://simplesamlphp.org/), to allow Council users to automatically login to the system and see content which is otherwise hidden to external members of the public. This feature allows the Council to share confidential data with wider members of the Council who are located across a number of different locations in a secure manner.
The project included an initial research phase and close collaborative working with the Council’s digital transformational team, along with colleagues within IT and Communications. As part of the project, Big Blue Door provided training to internal staff who will be using the CMS on a regular basis and we have implemented a workflow to allow content to be easily tracked and audited, allowing only specific users (content administrators) the ability to approve and publish content, while wider staff (editors) can only draft content.
The new system supports a number of complex webforms, allowing members of the public to complete data submissions (e.g. Register births, marriages, deaths) and includes a dynamic search engine allowing the public to quickly and easily find resources from across the extensive Council digital estate.
Working to WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines, this site includes Big Blue Door’s own accessibility module allowing users to easily change the font size across the site as well as utilise different colour contrasts to assist users with screen readability difficulties.
The site includes a number of complex integrations including delivering GIS visualisation solutions for the Council. For this specific project we worked with an external API solution to ensure that a range of local data could be displayed within a GIS map. This includes data relating to local Councillors, Library locations, Bin collection dates and Polling stations. As you can see from the screenshot below, data can then be displayed within an interactive map.
Technically the new site is hosted within Amazon Web Services (AWS) via the London region, using separate availability zones for backups and disaster recovery. This infrastructure uses an autoscaling group to ensure that traffic bursts can be easily and automatically managed and a CDN is in place for global caching. The system uses Jenkins for fully automated deployments.
Post-launch we are providing ongoing support and maintenance for the Council, ensuring that 24/7 infrastructure is in place, along with the management of all infrastructure and application security updates (e.g. Drupal core and modules). This support work is managed against a number of agreed KPIs and uses a formal service level agreement (SLA) and service desk process for management reporting.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen by the Council because of its flexibility and the ability to connect with third party applications via APIs. The easy to use CMS and granular permissions model was also a benefit for the team.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
