Last week, the Forest Products Commission (FPC) launched their new web site, which we had a hand in developing.

Our project was to assist the FPC in updating their website into a modern content management system. We proposed that they use the aGov Drupal distribution as it implements many of the state and national requirements in terms of security, metadata and accessibility, meaning that we were able to focus on custom content, custom webforms, themeing and supporting their team around the launch.

We used some interesting technologies such as the Behaviour Driven Development testing framework, Behat, to write user interface tests to ensure that changes made through the Drupal UI don’t break desired functionality.

Custom content types

We set up a number of custom Drupal content types and associated views to enable our client to manage their content appropriately. These include:

• Forestry news articles – eg. this news article and the news article listing page.
• Species factsheet – eg. the Gidgee (Acacia pruinocarpa) factsheet and species listing page.

Custom webforms

We used the powerful webform module to build several forms to capture feedback from the public. The advantage of using a flexible module like webform makes it possible to build fairly complex forms with dependency between fields. A good example of this is the feedback and complaints form.

Themeing

The theme for the new site uses Responsive Web Design, enabling content to be viewed clearly on both mobile devices and desktop computers. The theme is a subtheme of the excellent zen Drupal theme which aims at producing sensible, clean, semantically meaningful markup.

Screenshot of the original FPC website.

The website went live last week, and we will be undertaking a few final tasks on the FPC intranet site to help with their internal data management.  It’s been a pleasure to work with the team to get to the launch last week – if you have any queries about this project feel free to leave a comment below, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Kehan