Over the past several years, Gaia Resources has grown its team considerably due to an increase in demand for our services. However, there are still plenty of occasions where we acknowledge that a specific project or undertaking requires additional resources or skills, beyond what our own team delivers. Sometimes this is in an opportunity to move into an entirely new area (when we partnered with the Global Wetlands project for a fish identification solution using AI), or in delivery of a specialised solution that we want to ensure we bring all of the best knowledge and skills to the area (such as the consortium of organisations we have brought together for the delivery of the Queensland State Archives Digital Preservation project.)

Sometimes it is because our values align so well with a partner it is almost like considering them an extension of the team.

This is the case with our partners in the digital experience agency, Liquid Interactive. We have worked so well with them, and so often that we will not only consider them for projects that we know will utilise their skills and specialisations, our own team is excited for each opportunity to work alongside them.

We have worked with them as sub-contractors to deliver development support for Drupal websites in GovCMS; they have assisted us on projects where providing data delivery with a great user experience was key; when one of our team members relocated to a city without any other Gaia Resources staff, we set up her office to be colocated with Liquid Interactive team members. I have also been fairly regularly featuring their Future Led Series of events in my own blogs, and while the events themselves have been a fantastic opportunity to hear informed and varied opinions on topics that matter to our future – I also have to confess to enjoying an opportunity to get to know their team a little better.

Liquid Interactive themselves was first introduced to us through one of our previous employees, Morgan Strong, who has engaged them successfully in previous roles. Morgan has moved on to a role as the Digital Transformation Manager at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), but is also still heavily involved in our organisation as a Drupal and Open Source advocate, and as a client in delivering Collection-based projects.

The world is ever-changing, but I believe there are some things that remain the same. One of these is that as much as what we deliver is important, how we do it is also impactful. It is through our connections with other people that we come to understand the world, so building positive connections can only help us to find our place to deliver the most to our community.

If you are interested in working with an organisation that is collaborative, people-focused, and provides a supportive culture for teamwork, reach out to us via email at info@gaiaresouces.com.au or connect with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Sophie

The post Partnerships, people and change appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Screenshot of the Q-Album home page

After the program concluded there were a number of iterations, design improvements, and customer testing rounds which led to the development of Q-Album, which went live with a soft launch in late 2019. Q-Album hosts over 500 historic collection items from the collection and has now been opened to community groups across Queensland to contribute their historic items to build a community resource.

The platform includes:

• comparisons between historic photos and modern street views,
• digitised archival materials,
• publishing workflows between community groups and QSA,
• mapping tools,
• tag-based taxonomies of content,
• organisational profiles, and
• cross-referencing to TROVE and other historic data sources.

If you’d like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help with you archives project, let me know via email or on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Piers

The post Q-Album – visualising Queensland’s archive collections appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The brief was bringing the archival collection to life. Easily said, but the barrier to entry to explore archival series and the like for non-archivists is fairly high. And another part of the brief was to enable a platform that allowed contributions from the community. Easily said, but we wanted to do something a bit more dynamic then allowing comments and social sharing.

The TWiG program also brought with it a structure to develop our product – that is 6 x 2 week sprints, with a public release at the end of each sprint. This meant lots of rapid development, and being comfortable releasing something that is not always finished with engagement and participation from the community.

This rapid release and engaging the community to feedback and help shape development is a cornerstone of Agile development, but something is a bit new to many GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institutions – Agile development and software creation might be common, but releasing two-week old prototypes is something new entirely.

But it proved to be the projects greatest strength. It meant that we got feedback on decisions almost immediately, and it showed that you can still deliver evolving projects early (rather than completely finished projects) as long as you take the community with you.

The cornerstone of the project, was the “Now and then” concept, which came out of the first sprint, and was validated quickly with user research. Essentially, it allows photographs to be organised into time, space and categorised, and then the location of the image draw upon the Google Streetview API so that you can see a modern view of that image.

How this bring archives to life is that it becomes the entry point to the government and archives – viewing the photo acts as an anchor to related links in archives and series. Rather than knowing the collection and the terminology, you explore and then find what’s interesting (e.g. colonial buildings in early Queensland history, creation of Southbank, bridge development, regional change etc).

We also saw this as a platform that in future iterations could engage the community. Rather than ask for comments and stories, we ask for the community groups to become publishers – they use their own archival photo collections to complement the State Archive’s stories and collections, and the Archive’s collection becomes the anchor for this work.  The proof-of-concept was delivered and validated, so we’re now in negotiations about taking this further which we hope to report on in the very near future.

In the meantime, I’ve taken a static snapshot of the site, which you can explore using the map below:

Some of the functionality has been turned off for now (e.g. the feedback form, search, background images for the timelines) as this is a static, archival snapshot of the project; the site would be migrated into a new platform for any future stages.

Feel free to have a look around!

Also, if you’d like to watch our succinct 7 minute presentation that we gave at the TWiG showcase back in late September, the presentation is available on the YouTube video below (skip forward to 1 hr, 4 mins, 38 secs for our part (1:04:38))

If you’d like to get in touch about this project then feel free to contact me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post Discovering Qld – a reflection appeared first on Gaia Resources.

In my previous role at the Western Australian Museum, I had attended as a data mentor, someone who helps participants understand the datasets, but I am fairly new as a participant.  So, for this year’s event, I registered to attend the Brisbane node, with a view to run my own team and investigate open data from the National Pollutant Inventory.

Due to family commitments, I couldn’t spend the whole weekend out at the hack, instead working a few hours from home. But I did get enough time to import around 12,000 water pollution records into a Drupal site, and then build a number of discovery and interrogation tools for that data.

But rather than write a lengthy piece, I think I can explain it better through this video:

If you’re interested in checking it out, I’ve published the hack to my own personal website for now:

• http://mstrong.info/water-output
• http://mstrong.info/content/govhack-2016-supporting-documentation

Enjoy! And if you like, send me an email, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post GovHack 2016 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

One of the reasons we had decided to use D8 was that the initial forms requirements were not too sophisticated, and we believed that the existing D8 form solutions (eForm and Contact Form + Contact Storage) should cover the requirements.  As any Drupal advocate knows, the forms solution freely available in the D7 eco-system, Entity Forms and Webform, are very powerful and are a strong reason to stay on the D7 platform. Nevertheless, eForm and Contact Form are improving in maturity and we thought it was time to move to D8 with this project.

However, as the project progressed, the form requirements became a bit more complex, and we found ourselves stranded as Contact Form + Contact Storage was not quite suitable, and to get eForms to meet our requirements, we’d have use the Rules module which was not production ready in D8.  So much for our initial thinking!

Enter the YAML Aint Markup Language (YAML) form, and all is well.  YAML form was released in June 2016 and, in my opinion, is the best Drupal form solution so far.

In terms of functionality, YAML form has almost reached parity with Webform from the D7 platform. However, YAML form uses Drupal Entities, meaning it is properly integrated with the rest of the system – so you can use the output to create Views and you can attach forms to other nodes and blocks. So all the great functionality of Webform, but with the integration and scalability of Entity Forms.

I should also say it scales really well. Like, really well. Multipage, dozens of fields, save and return, everything you could hope for in a web form is supported, at scale.

But perhaps the greatest benefit is the fact you can script the forms in YAML. So to make a new field, you only need to write a few lines of code in YAML. Thus a large multi-page form with dozens of fields and conditional validation can be made in minutes. Even putting together file uploads to a private directory with restricted file formats and size requires only five YAML declarations (‘#title’, ‘#type’, ‘#max_filesize’, ‘#upload_location’, ‘#file_extensions’).

Site builders have not been forgotten, and there is a user interface (UI) so you can still select form elements and build forms without in a manner not dissimilar to Webform in D7.

But the point of this blog post is not just to talk about how much we enjoyed using YAML form, it’s to provide a few pointers for those getting started with YAML form, and we hope this helps.

Get going in YAML

Once you’ve installed YAML form, it’s time to get started in making your first form.

Go to Structure > YAML form, then I recommend tapping on “edit” for the default “Contact Form”, the tap “Source (YAML)” to see a basic YAML structure. What you’ll see is the screen above.

At this point you will notice a basic structure. The name of a declaration (a field) is a single word (or words with underscores) followed by a colon. After the colon, the attributes are indented with two spaces.

You only really need two declarations: ‘#title’ (the name of the input) and ‘#type’ (such textfield, email, select, checkbox, file_upload etc). But it’s good to also have ‘#required’ as true or false to determine if it’s required.

Now the contact form only has a few attributes, textfield, textarea and email. Which doesn’t make for a sophisticated form. That’s where the examples come in handy.

Use the examples

When you install YAML form, you have the option to enable two extensions: “YAML Form Examples” and “YAML Form Templates”. Doing so will give you some great examples and templates to clone and use for more complicated forms.

These examples are best explored, but include form wizards, input masks (say for inputting IP addresses), state API, pagination, validation etc.

Before making your first complicated form, I recommend looking at some of these examples, but what is great is that everything is quite simple, and still only require a handful of lines of YAML to complete.

Utilise the option list

In the section “Structure” > “YAML Form” > “Settings”. There are some really powerful settings area, this includes setting global defaults (such as the previous / next button labels, email templates, limits etc). I recommend changing these to match your global site requirements.

But one really fantastic area is the “Options”, this is where you set the reusable form elements for all of your forms (eg. Select list options, Booleans checks, Calendars etc). To reuse these form elements, you only need to invoke the ID listed on that page (see the screen shot above) in your YAML declarations.

One piece of specific advice I have is that if you need to do any customisations (e.g. swapping US states for Australian states) I recommend making a new option list rather than editing a default one. I had a few issues myself, and found it much easier to create new lists than swap out the existing lists.

Discover the form elements

Also in the section “Structure” > “YAML Form” > “Settings”, there is another section “elements”. This is a great reference page for when you are writing your YAML form attributes. On this page you can see all of the available form elements and the attributes that used as you define your form elements. I’ve found keeping this page open in a tab at all times during development has greatly sped up dev time, and is a lot quicker than looking at the examples and templates (the examples are great for getting an overview, but once you are familiar this page is the best place to reference).

Build Drupal VIEWS

As listed in my introduction, YAML form uses Drupal entities. This means, you can create views from form submissions. All the power of views to interpret your results!

Of course if you’d prefer traditional reports and CSV reports, there’s a results tab under each form as well.

And if you don’t want to write code… there’s a UI

Lastly, for those who loved the UI of Webform, there is a UI available for YAML form.

When you install YAML form there is the choice to activate an YAML Form UI. At the time of writing (July 2016) this was still listed as experimental, and to be honest I’ve not used it much as I prefer writing YAML, but from what I’ve seen it looks great, and not dissimilar to the Webform UI.

YAML form – the future of forms for Drupal 8?

I must say after using eForms and Contact Form in D8, I much prefer YAML form. eForm has been flagged as the future for forms in D8, but I think YAML form will disrupt that and is fantastic additional to the D8 ecosystem.

I’m more than happy to chat about Drupal anytime so feel free to drop me an email, or start a conversation with us via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post YAML Forms for Drupal 8 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

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

The post Implementing the Drupal aGov distribution at the Forest Products Commission appeared first on Gaia Resources.