Drupal in public administration

The commitment of the Public Administration to open source software has increased exponentially in recent years and today we can tell that it is a fact both nationally and internationally. Proof of this can be found in the world of web portals and more specifically in DRUPAL.

It is no simple coincidence that City Hall sites such as Boston city, Los Angeles, Washington, London, Brussels, Dublin or the European Union use Drupal in their websites.

Guessing the next question is obvious... why do they use Drupal?

In the first place, it is important to highlight the role of the website. Nowadays they are the window of the Town Halls towards the citizens. Through their sites they offer their services, that is why it is especially important to take care of their image and the experience that the citizens receive when browsing these portals.

And what are the requirements that the administration aims at and that Drupal offers?

The most important of these are listed below:

• Open source, supported by a large community that guarantees the continuity and continuous improvement of the technology, thus avoiding dependence on a single supplier or technology.
• Robust, must manage a large amount of content with a medium to high level of complexity.
• Secure, complying with regulations and data protection.
• Modular design, which allows you to add or remove functionality by installing or uninstalling modules and allows you to change the appearance by installing or uninstalling themes.
• Modern and accessibles designs (A, AA, AAA) and functionalities.
• WYSIWYG, rich text editing that eases content management.
• Reusability, creation of templates for the different portals that facilitate the creation/incorporation of new portals from the CMS itself.
• Internationalization (multi-language).

For all this, it is easy to understand the need of a CMS like Drupal that keeps growing day by day supported by a great community that more than 1500 people join every month to improve this software.

From my experience as a sales manager at Drupalera I have yet to hear of a single customer using Drupal who is not satisfied, both in private or public sector. So I understand that in addition to the aforementioned advantages for public administration, Drupal fits into organizations in an overwhelming way.

Last but not least, I do not want to miss the opportunity to comment on the success story that we at "La Drupalera" have implemented for TIC Mallorca, in which we develop the websites for all the Town Halls of Mallorca, and where we highlight these milestones:

• Creation of a module for the customization of each of the websites at the frontend level.
• Creation of different templates for the homes so that each municipality could choose the one that best suits its requirements.
• Development of a web instancer so that if you wanted to create a new website just by choosing the theme you already had it created automatically.

Thanks to this, we managed to create from some templates (frontend/backend) the different webs in an agile and personalized way. Proof of this can be found on the Manacor Town Hall and Santanyí Town Hall websites.