How Drupal Helps Governments Transform Their Website Experience

Divesh Kumar

How Drupal Helps Governments Transform Their Website Experience

With the latest age of technology, governments are looking to automate activities and operations that involve manually filling out paper forms, standing in queues, and other tedious tasks.

They also need to provide updates on the latest policies, actions, and programs as well as spread awareness regarding various initiatives.

In a nutshell, governments want to use technology to give citizens access to necessary activities and information on operations and essential services. But very few have in-house technical teams to work on this. Some train resources with non-technical backgrounds to contribute to these functions, and that’s where a content management system comes into play.

Several content management systems are available these days, and Drupal is among the best of them. On a high level, Drupal provides an enhanced user experience in a single package and on an open-source basis that allows for the development of delightful digital experiences.

Drupal in the Government Sector

More than 150 national government websites utilize Drupal. (The entire list of government websites is available on drupal.org.)

In 2009, it was chosen as the platform for WhiteHouse.gov and all its related websites. This likely gave the open-source platform a significant amount of reliability and certainty, and encouraged other government offices to follow suit.

In the years since, Drupal has increasingly become a prominent organizations’ desired platform for building sophisticated, data-adapted systems. It has an extraordinary open-source community and tremendous features that are more advanced when compared to the other content management platforms.

Primary Features of Drupal

Drupal supports out-of-the-box solutions for content structure, content authoring, API-driven development, e-commerce features, and integration with marketing automation platforms.

The main features Drupal provides for government websites include:

Security

Uncompromised security is the essential reason government associations are deciding to use Drupal.

Drupal's very own security team and the other identical committees (known as the "security working group") guarantee that Drupal core and contributed modules provide world-class security and integrate best security practices for web designers and module engineers.

These security modules, made possible by Drupal's security committee, are worth the utilization:

Login Security: Provides basic access control while denying IP addresses full access to the site's content
Password Policy: Convolutes the password and stores the data from dictionary attacks and other brute-force methods
Security Patches: The security unit can fix the HTML infusion issue and save the site from any semblance of a cross-site scripting attack
Captcha: Protects the site's contact and sign-up forms
Secure Login: Ensures that the entered login or submitted data is done securely by using HTTPS, avoiding passwords and user data vandalism

Cost

With Drupal, government associations are given a high level of adaptability and security without immense operational and maintenance costs.

Government websites are sustained and retained by an immense community that provides free security extensions, modules, distributions, etc., at half the cost spent before.

In the United States alone, Drupal powers 120 government office sites, and 150 nations use Drupal to adapt to the difficulties of the advanced world.

Multilingual Capabilities

It’s vital for government sites to consider their more extensive and divergent populations. The content translation module in Drupal enables pages and individual content to be translated by making a cloned set in the translated language.

Another alternative, the entity translation module, permits specific fields to be translated. More than a hundred languages are accessible.

With this, Drupal gives the administrator a choice to write in their preferred language while the content can be translated into the destination language.

Multisite Functionality

Governments have countless sites that would take a huge amount of time to build. With its multisite feature, Drupal provides the time-saving flexibility to manage multiple sites effectively and efficiently with a single codebase.

A comparative codebase guarantees that specific highlights stay equal throughout, and consistency is maintained. It improves the administration as well as guarantees that each redesign is done just once.

Accessibility

Drupal's principal responsibility to accessibility standards guarantees that every one of its highlights and capacities complies with the World Wide Web Consortium rules (WCAG) and ADA rules.

Scalability

Government sites need a versatile stage on which to build their websites. As proven by its ability to support some of the world's most heavily trafficked websites, Drupal can deal with content-rich locales and experiences without buckling or breaking.

Drupal powers over a million sites that range from Fortune 500 companies (Time and Mercedes) to prominent government websites, global organizations (the EU, CERN, and NASA), and high-traffic sites (Weather.com, the GRAMMY Awards, and the NBC’s Olympics site). These sites don’t go down when hit with a traffic spike.

Modules and Distribution in Drupal 9

With government sites, a lot of components and functionalities are similar, such as recent news, announcements, government strategies, and data regarding government plans.

All these can be accomplished with modules and distributions like aGov, OpenPublic, govCMS and Drupal voor Gemeenten.

Many extra modules are accessible to address specific needs, and Drupal offers the ability to alter existing modules to meet prerequisites and make them available for others to utilize. It is significantly simpler and quicker to build websites with the assistance of distributions and modules.

For example, the Australian government’s website is built using aGov, which is appropriate for both large and small organizations, across local, state, and government portfolios. More than 300 sites utilize it.

Customized Content Structure

To guarantee their citizens are well-informed governments release content each day in various types — blogs, instructive pages, news items, photographs, surveys, video exhibitions, and social media posts.

In addition to Articles and Basic Pages, Drupal facilitates the use of other core and contributed modules, which can be used to create custom content types.

Integration and Creativity Solutions

Government websites once were considered boring and unappealing, but this is changing. Many governments understand that they must work to further their potential benefit by providing engaging content about their services.

Drupal CMS provides a wide range of opportunities for creativity and can be integrated with enterprise content, information repositories, and internal publishing tools.