Hello.
I work in communications for the Council of the Isles of Scilly - a small group of islands off the west coast of England. We are the UK's smallest Local Authority, meaning we have an important and wide remit, but with a small population.
Website wise, this obviously creates a pretty unique challenge. We need to be able to offer a website that offers all the interactivity and features of a modern Council website (in terms of paying online, sorting out appointments and collections etc) but on a smaller budget and for a smaller unique community. There are also issues of compliance with data protection and processing laws.
We've spent a far amount of time researching this, looking into the different options available. Our current website: www.scilly.gov.uk is now 11 years old. So we are looking at a revamp.
We think Drupal holds the answer to this. Our hope is that by using an open source CMS we can break up the website into much smaller projects, contracting to smaller companies to do inidvidual elements of a much larger website.
Please note, this project is still in its infancy. I am hoping in the future to update this thread as progress is made, but currently this is more of a plan between myself and the people in IT. It is still yet to be voted on, achieve a budget etc.
So, there were three points to starting this forum:
1) I thought if this project goes ahead it could be worth documenting and sharing with other Drupal enthusiasts out there.
2) I would like to know if anyone else knows of other similar plans, or has any thoughts on the suitability of Drupal to this project. It would be nice to get feedback on the general principle of the plan.
3) If there are any budding web developers out there looking for projects - then they can get in touch now and register a sort of early interest (my email is gpearson@scilly.gov.uk). When we are ready to actually begin work I will get in touch with any companies that register an interest. Companies of all size welcome.
(All views expressed in this post, and any other posts in this thread, are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer.)
Comments
Great
Such fun!
1) Yes - the more you can document and share with other Drupal enthusiasts the better. That's what makes Drupal good to be part of - those who use it are often willing to contribute back, so that others can learn from their experiences and build on them. I'm delighted you thought of that, and hopefully that will follow through.
2) I don't know of other similar projects, but I'd have thought Drupal is ideal. The only caution is that Drupal can do so much, it would need careful project management, and clear briefs. Someone, or a team within the council's IT, has to have a clear vision for what the site would look like. There needs to be a master plan. Take modules for instance. If different developers are going to work on different sections of the site, they may need similar modules. You don't want unnecessary modules installing, and somebody has to keep an overview so that when the time comes to upgrade to a new version of Drupal someone knows why each bit of the site is there, and what it needs to do in the next version.
3) Definitely not going to offer my own services - no time - but again, making sure everyone works together is key.
You may get better economy of scale to offer one development house the whole site (at least, it's first version). You can always spend more time and money later to add new features in a second phase.
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Start with a distribution
Have you already checked out possible Distributions?
http://drupal.org/project/agov
http://www.opengovplatform.org/
https://github.com/opengovplatform
or
http://drupal.org/project/commons
or
http://drupal.org/project/panopoly
I currently relaunch a german federal state and Drupal 7 is great, but some very custom issues take time and especially planning before stating is really important.
I do agree that basing your
I do agree that basing your redevelopment on Drupal is a good strategic decision. The "gotchas" with Drupal tend to include a steep learning curve (as you will probably have discovered by now) and ongoing maintenance (installation of bug-fix and security updates). But, those are not reasons for not using Drupal, simply factors that need to be planned for.
Thanks...
Thanks for everyone's replies and thoughts so far. The help and thought input of the Drupal community is always much appreciated.
For a bit more clarification on my own knowledge level, I have built a couple of websites using Drupal (and Joomla before that), but these were all pretty small scale and certainly not on this kind of level. So issues of building/heavily customising modules is not something I've had experience with.
I think the current plan would be to have a base site built by one company/group for certain, and then additional functionality could be developed by adding further modules etc.
I reckon Drupal will be a very exciting way to go though. And I think in our comewhat unique situation of limited resources versus wide ranging responsibilities, hopefully this project will be something quite interesting.
Drupal Public Sector Exchange
Hello George,
Please come and join the UK Public Sector Exchange group. You may discover some interesting ideas and nice people.
http://groups.drupal.org/public-sector-exchange