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Meet the furry (and not so furry) friends who were keeping the GovCMS team company during the most recent COVID-19 lockdown.
As 2021 draws to a close, it’s a good time to dive in and do some tidy-up on your GovCMS project, or projects.
What a year it’s been! There have been multiple updates to the GovCMS platform and the journey is far from over, as we are always looking at different ways to improve. We look forward to venturing into the new year with you, as we continue to update and grow as a platform.
As we wrap up 2021 and get ready for 2022, GovCMS have stopped taking bookings for routine forklifts or go-lives until Monday, 17 January 2022. During this time, GovCMS will be operating on skeleton staff, with many of the team taking a well-earned break.
It’s likely you’ve already met Reece. He is the one who helps onboard your website to the GovCMS platform and get it to go-live. Alongside onboarding, he plays an important role in answering your GovCMS enquiries. Reece hit the ground running when he joined our GovCMS onboarding team back in April.
That which we call an MOU (or Memorandum of Understanding) by any other name, would be a formal agreement.
A further 7 suppliers have been added to the GovCMS Drupal Services Panel in November 2021. This means you now have more options to compare and choose from when deciding what’s right for your project. Making it even easier to make a value for money assessment.
The GovCMS community is a large part of what makes GovCMS, GovCMS. We’re more than a whole of government web hosting service, we’re a growing community of individuals who come together to innovate, learn and solve problems across government.
So far this year, over 200 individuals from over 80 organisations have joined us at one, or more, of our community events. And 2021 is not done yet.
GovCMS will soon be upgrading part of the hosting infrastructure used by all websites on the platform. We will be switching from RedHat OpenShift to Amazon EKS. This will be a seamless transition and will ensure the ongoing resilience of your GovCMS website(s), ensuring faster scalability of the infrastructure in the event of spikes in web traffic, and maintaining the high security standards of the GovCMS platform.
A big thank you to the whole community. Over the past four months we’ve seen all GovCMS SaaS Drupal 8 websites make the move to Drupal 9. This has been a massive feat and we appreciate the community’s willingness to get onboard, help us and help each other.
We're excited to announce GovCMS Week Online Take 2! A series of short online events between the 15th and 19th of November 2021 that will reconnect the community and explore all that is GovCMS.
The Onboarding team here at GovCMS are always finding new ways to help our customers. Recently, the team put their heads together to come up with their top five tips for making your journey to go-live easier.
It’s not just GovCMS websites that are moving to Drupal 9.
From February 2022, our Content Administration and Site Builder training manuals and live training sessions will be on Drupal 9 too. While there aren’t too many changes between Drupal 8 and 9, this change means we’ll be providing the most up to date and relevant advice to members of the community.
We are interested to hear from any of the developers who work on the GovCMS platform. We want your feedback on what works for you, what challenges you face and what opportunities you see.
The Department of Finance has finalised the first group of 8 suppliers for the Panel. These suppliers have been approved by GovCMS to provide expertise in GovCMS and Drupal.
The September 2021 Agency Update from GovCMS
There’s less than four months left of 2021 and our remaining training session is filling up fast. Register now for the last Content Administration session of 2021.
If you can’t make it, don’t worry. Our live training sessions will pick back up in February 2022. Until then you can access the Content Administration and Site Builder training manuals online, 24/7.
On the 30th of September the GovCMS community on Discourse will close. With users being redirected to GovTEAMS. This change is in response to feedback that having too many channels, makes finding the right one harder.
Thank you to everyone who joined us for the Live Q&A on the 11th of August. We received some great insights into what’s important to our community, and where GovCMS can step up to help you.
50 members of the community turned out to ask (and answer) questions about Drupal and GovCMS. As always, it was fantastic to see members of the community answer each other's questions, sharing their own expertise and knowledge.
GovCMS is committed to continuous improvement. That’s why we’re already adding great things to the Drupal 9 (D9) distribution.
The 2.4.0 release on 7 September 2021 included the addition of the Layout Builder Modal and Layout Builder Restrictions modules to the D9 distribution. These modules extend the functionality of the Layout Builder core module, providing users with a better interface, and the ability to control which blocks and layouts appear.