The NSW Food Authority regulates and monitors food safety across the entire food industry supply chain in NSW. It plays a vital role in protecting the health and wellbeing of the people in NSW through mitigating food safety risks, rapidly responding in the event of a food safety incident and providing education, training and technical information to consumers and industry.
The NSW Food Authority engaged Morpht to redevelop, refresh the design of its website and migrate the content from TRIM WCMS to GovCMS. The aim was to move to a scalable platform that delivers high-quality security protection and compliance.
NSW Food Authority expected the site to be architecturally sound, only needing improvements to its accessibility and mobile responsiveness.
About the project
The Morpht solution
Unpacking the site for migration
Understanding the architecture of the site, how many content types and how they relate to each other was an essential first step. We created automated scripts to extract the content and pages from 4 different sources:
- site database
- image server
- external systems housing penalty notices
- prosecution notice register
Restructuring the information architecture
After extracting all the content, we reviewed and defined a set of content types and how they relate to each. We developed a content model to structure the information and display it in different modes and layouts. Some of the content types we defined were:
- 4 news types e.g. media releases, recalls, advisories, etc
- 8 resource types e.g. factsheets, guides, policies, etc
- Third party auditor
- Training organisation
- Penalty notice
- Prosecution notice
Feeds and registers
An organisation such as NSW Food Authority with its broad oversight and responsibility for ensuring food safety needs a multitude of ways to consume and export data feeds. We created a variety of registers that consume and export XML data feeds that are searchable, filterable and sortable to improve the user experience. Here are a few examples
Integrated interactive tools
To support NSW Food Authority’s education focus we integrated interactive tools for consumers to understand food labelling and for startup businesses to learn about their food safety requirements and obligations.
Shellfish harvest area alerts
A recent addition to the site is an application that consumes an external data feed about the safety and status of shellfish harvest areas. The application pulls in updates for the data feed, indexes them and surfaces the data on the site. Users can then filter and search through the feed for their relevant harvest area.
Why Drupal was chosen
Refresh, modernise, simplify, make accessible.
The four principal aims for the design refresh.
We kick-started it by implementing our bespoke Drupal Distribution for GovCMS - Convivial. This is a cost-effective and timesaving solution. We adopted the NSW Design System and adapted Convivial to take on the relevant components and design patterns. This got us a long way towards reworking the existing content structures into new patterns and components. With this system in place, NSW Food Authority has at its fingertips the capability to build a variety of page layouts.
As with any site migration we’ve undertaken in the past, we were ready to delve into the site setup and CMS database to work out how to best extract pages, content types and define their inter-relationships. We found that TRIM CMS exposed content in HTML and XML with related documents. We identified:
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6221 HTML pages
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808 XML unique pages
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1197 files
We extended that content with two external systems integrated into the site to surface a register for Approved Third Party Auditors and the ‘Name and Shame’ registers. Another hurdle in this race was the sourcing of content images stored on a different server to the site.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
GovCMS SaaS utilising Convivial for GovCMS provides an incredibly firm base to build a Departmental website on.
The SaaS platform provides a solid and secure framework for the website, which is managed by a dedicated and skilled team on your behalf. Convivial for GovCMS sits on top of the base CMS install. With thousands of dedicated hours invested into this framework, Convivial provides well considered, highly flexible tools that enable an incredibly quick start-up for any website. Within 3 weeks we can establish content types with components that provide a multitude of options to build out feature rich and flexible content. Using this approach frees up key staff to focus on the important elements of content and communications delivery.
