Published on the 13/11/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
The Federal Government has created a Drupal-based web content management system and relocated its homepage to the public cloud in the search for savings and flexibility…
The Australia.gov.au homepage has been recreated using the newly released govCMS content management system, and is now running on the Acquia cloud which is hosted in Amazon Web Services’ Australian datacenters.
According to the government chief technology officer John Sheridan, this will significantly reduce the cost of running websites hosting public information, and inject additional flexibility. He said that in the past getting a change to a web site could take months.
Sheridan was keen to point out that only public information would be hosted on these sites – and that any private information would still need to be accessed via secure Government-hosted websites, often via the myGov website to which govCMS will link. The Australia.gov.au site attracts two million hits a month and 12 percent of visitors are redirected to myGov.
There are around 900 individual federal websites according to Sheridan. While migration to the new govCMS and cloud is not mandated, he said that those agencies which did make the move would benefit from a “bunch of savings”.
Earlier this year he signalled that as many as 450 could make the move. The Department of Finance and the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority have already committed to migrating their websites to govCMS.
Those agencies which do go down this route will pay website fees to the Department of Finance, although Sheridan was not able to outline the cost structure. He said however that the deal could be worth as much as $24 million to Acquia over the next four years.
Acquia is currently working with the govCMS team to develop common themes and templates, which can be used to create government sites, and training courses detailing the govCMS are scheduled to run in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra on Friday.
Sheridan said that the decision to embrace the open source Drupal platform was part of a broader government policy to use open source where possible. He acknowledged that technical analysis of the platform had found other tools had the edge, but that the fact that Drupal had been used to build sites such as whitehouse.gov had influenced the decision to adopt Drupal and the Acquia cloud.
