To everyone contributing at DrupalCon — Thank you!
![DAFWA Homepage](http://web.archive.org./web/20190414094047im_/https://www.drupal.org/files/styles/grid-8/public/dafwa-home.png?itok=VQIf0HjN)
The Department of Agriculture & Food (DAFWA) provides support to Western Australia’s agrifood businesses through services and partnerships.
Like a lot of organisations and businesses, their website is the primary channel for communication and reference. The website therefore aims to provide comprehensive information about DAFWA and its services including research and scientific data, programs and partnerships, applications and tools, state legislative materials and laboratory services.
The previous website was built in 2006 and suffered a number of issues including being difficult to navigate and search, outdated content that was poorly presented, lack of support for modern browsers and devices (mobile), non-compliance with WCAG Accessibility standards and from the staff perspective, difficult to publish and maintain.
The department reviewed a range of different products including Wordpress, Joomla, Umbraco and DotNetNuke. Ultimately they settled on Drupal due to the following reasons:
- non-vendor lock-in license (GPL)
- out of box support for web and accessibility standards
- strong security and granular user permissions system
- ability to be customised and extended whilst remaining on the upgrade path
- ability to integrate easily with third party systems
- usage by other Western Australia state departments including the Public Sector Commission and WA Museum.
- flexibility to mass migrate content from other systems automatically
- easy to acquire and maintain underlying software stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
In October 2012, the DAFWA Gateway project commenced with the following goals:
- to design and develop a website platform using Drupal that suited the Departments requirements for content types, content publishing workflow, and 3rd party integrations,
- to design a look and feel that was consistent with Corporate Branding requirements, compliant with Western Australian Government Framework guidelines and met Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.
- setup server infrastructure to support Drupal and it’s technology stack.
- train existing technical staff in Drupal so that they may take over when the project is completed.
Please see the "Why these modules chosen" section below on the technical details of the Drupal implementation.
In early 2013, a separate project commenced which involved auditing and prioritising all the content from the old website. Training of all staff to perform data entry tasks into Drupal and content publishing workflow was also conducted.
In January 2014 the Drupal website went live and the project team was extended to work on implementing the Departments intranet using Drupal yet again (perhaps another case study will be submit to d.o shortly!).
For the month of February 2014, the number of visits increased by almost 50%, and the number of pages per visit and time spent on the site almost doubled.
Below are links to a number of patches. Some were already committed and others are still being reviewed:
- #1960902: Undefined index: panelizer during attach hook.
- #2015885: Fix for LatLng coordinates not wrapping.
- #2063765: Bad login prompt example in README.txt + templating options
- #2017429: mime_content_type deprecated
- #1917848: body stub value causing problems for media module
- #2111271: Add handling for fields with arrays (was: Creating Addressfields)
- #2048383: Subcontexts not loading
- #1896286: taxonomy_term_save not creating with vocab machine name
The technical team consisted of:
- Tim Maling - Project Manager
- Sam Hassell - Full stack Developer
- Alex Bergin - Full stack Developer
- Steve Collins - Web Designer
- Neil Steventon - Integration Developer
As well as develop the website, we were also tasked with training up existing permanent technical staff to eventually take over maintenance of the website. The services of Chris Skene of PreviousNext were also employed to assist in the technical training phase.
![Screenshot of landing page](http://web.archive.org./web/20190414094047im_/https://www.drupal.org/files/styles/grid-8/public/Wheat---Department-of-Agriculture-and-Food.png?itok=VjgdUOGz)