Credit: Dreamstime
Canberra-based IT services provider OPC has wrapped up a project that saw it overhaul the Department of Defence’s Army website, redeveloping and upgrading the site to the Drupal 8 platform.
The project was won via the Department of Finance’s whole-of-government Drupal Services Panel, which claims at least 21 web development suppliers that can provide services for government entities wanting to develop sites on the federal GovCMS platform.
The GovCMS platform was launched in 2015 as a Drupal-based open source web content management system hosted on the public cloud and is managed by the Department of Finance.
According to OPC, the existing Army website was developed on an older version of Drupal, on the GovCMS software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, so the IT services provider took the opportunity to upgrade the website to the newer Drupal 8 platform.
Working closely with Defence’s internal information management team to hit the requirements of the redevelopment project, OPC’s Drupal web development team refreshed the look and feel of the website and supported the internal communications team to revise and improve the content on the site.
According to OPC, one of the core objectives of the project was to develop a website that could deliver rich and interesting content for users, while improving the ability to author content internally within the confines of the GovCMS SaaS platform.
As such, OPC said it made extensive use of the Paragraphs module to create a library of different options for authors to select from when developing new content.
“This had the added benefit of cutting down the number of Content Types, allowing existing functionality such as Image Galleries and Content Lists to be extracted out into a Paragraph that could then be added anywhere in the site via the content of a Basic Page,” the company said in a blog post.
As part of a separate project, another team of OPC developers worked on the Department’s Australian Army Research Centre (AARC) website, which was extracted from the original Army website to exist as its own entity. That site went live in January.
While both sites are unique, according to OPC, the company’s team of developers worked closely to ensure consistency between the two, including a fluid layout and menu structure.
While the Army website project was OPC’s first foray into work for the Department of Defence — one of the federal government’s biggest spenders on IT — it is understood the company is looking forward to working with Defence on a number of upcoming projects.
In December last year, the Department of Defence called for new partners to join its ICT services panel for the provision of application and software support, issuing a notice for suppliers to join its supplier list under the Enterprise Technology Operations Branch (ETOB).
The approach to market was designed to find suppliers to form part of “a new strategic approach to software and application sustainment support”.
