New webplatform for a Danish Municipality (Lyngby Taarbaek)
Design / UX
Government and Public Services
Case description
Lyngby Taarbaek Municipality is a municipality on Zealand in Denmark. Many of the municipality sites were already based on Drupal. However, it was an older version of Drupal, and they wanted a complete relaunch - including switching to Drupal 8. Lyngby Taarbaek Municipality wanted a multi-site platform that could manage up to 100 sites. They also wanted a new digital visual appearance that should support citizens' needs in terms of content, functionality and usability. The new digital platform should support the public digitization strategy in Denmark for 2016-2020 and support a clear exposure of the municipality's services, culture and experiences.At the same time, the platform had to be upgraded in terms of security.
The project was started with a concept, design and clarification process. Eksponent together with Lyngby Taarbaek Municipality had a number of workshops and various research activities. The main focus was on business goals, user needs and stakeholder priorities. In this phase, the new digital design-profile was also established. As a part of the clarification process we made a top task analysis where users helped identify and prioritize relevant content. This knowledge was used in work with the navigation and content structure.
Case goals and results
The solution was a Drupal 8 Multisite platform where you could quickly and easily build new subsites with your own visual profile based on the main website ltk.dk. We have made an integration with Lyngby-Taarbaek's SAML solution. The solution ensures that user creation and access management can be managed through Active Directory (AD). In order to support the many needs for presenting content, the solution is built in component-based design based on Drupal Paragraphs. Integrations are made for Vocast - handling press releases, political calendar activities via Office 365, integration with content from the shared public borger.dk, notification engine for both news and activities and for editors for notification of old or expired content.The result was a new digital multisite platform on Drupal 8, which has allowed the municipality to fulfill its high digital ambitions. Including new websites for the municipality's 11 schools.
Challenges
It is possible to build a Drupal multisite platform in many ways. At the beginning of the project, several alternative approaches were evaluated, before settling on a classic multisite approach.One of the key challenges was to balance a shared design system with local autonomy on each site. Finding the right balance between shared standards and flexibility is always difficult in a multisite architecture.
In the process, Drupal proved to be an excellent platform for the job. Drupals high degree of flexibility made it easy to support and manage local autonomy. It is easy and fast to set up new sites, and the user-friendly UI in Drupal's backend makes it easy to delegate responsibility to local employees.
The platform is rich in features, sites and integrations. To reduce complexity and increase quality we have a heavy focus on automation. Both in relation to deployment and test. Each time new code is added, hundreds of behat tests need to pass.
During the project a new law about web accessibility for public authorities in Denmark was passed. All public authorities should for new websites be WCAG 2.1compliant by september 2019. We have focused throughout the project in design and frontend implementation to work intensively with web accessibility and ensured that ltk.dk is WCAG 2.1 compliant.
Community contributions
In this project, we didn’t experience any need to extend or patch any module. Therefore, there has been little new code that was relevant to share from this project. The solution, of course, includes several custom modules. However, they are all very specific to LTK-specific integrations.Lyngby Taarbaek Municipality was one of the first Danish municipalities to adopt Drupal as a platform several years ago. By choosing Drupal once again, Lyngby Taarbaek Municipality is a key ambassador for Drupal as a platform for public sector organisations.