Common Web Platform first update

Being on an open source platform is a big plus — our entire project is about openness, transparency, and greater collaboration. That applies to our code, too. We’ve taken open sourced code and designs from the Gov.uk site and used that as the starting point for the design of Govt.nz. This has saved us a huge amount of time and money.

We’ve been working on the beta for a few months now, and we’re not just building a new site, we’re building some tools and CWP modules that will be reusable on other sites, saving other agencies time and money as well. Here’s a line up of what we’re working on:

• Replicant — this is a module that will enable developers to copy databases easily from one environment to another – really important when you need to get dev or test environments since all your publishing usually happens in your production database
• Lucidity — this is a small module that plugs in all the necessarily code to get the most recent version of Google Analytics working on your site. All the scripts you need are included, you just need to work out what user events you’re going to track.
• Children as grid — our content designers on the Govt.nz project love this module. Usually all your pages go into a folder on the site tree. If you get lots of pages in a single folder editing content can get a bit hard. Children as grid moves all the content in a folder into a table layout – its sortable, searchable, and we’re working on a drag’n’drop feature too.

Moving to the CWP has given us a modern platform that is more flexible and so much easier to use, and the savings we’re making mean we’re on track to recoup migration costs in about a year.

A big appeal of the platform has been the great range of out-of-the-box features designed to meet government needs, as well as the ability to develop custom functionality, as and when it is needed.

We needed an add-on to remind content owners to review their content at set dates, so we had it developed, and now it’s already in use by at least one other agency.

It’s this ability to share what we develop and collectively invest in the platform that will make it really great, I think.

Using cloud-based services for embedding video on your CWP website

The advantages of taking this approach are:

• Can compress a large range of video formats
• Support for large and long files
• Options to improve the quality of your video
• Various security options (password, embed-only, etc). Password can be used as a form of embargo, which is hard to achieve with a CMS usually.
• Web accessible player, including captioning
• User can choose HD or normal quality
• Works across all devices and when a new format is required they updated the player for you
• Provides analytics specifically about your video content
• Easy to publish to other social media platforms
• Doesn’t use up the bandwidth or storage on the CWP infrastructure

New and updates

• The New Zealand Gazette/Te Kāhiti o Aotearoa was launched on the CWP.
• Inland Revenue have signed up to the CWP.