Live Q&A wrap up
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.
Read more about what was said in the full wrap up below or access the full recording on the Live Q&A page.
GovCMS Update
Infrastructure change
Over the next 3 months the GovCMS distribution, and all 334 websites, will be moving to new infrastructure. This infrastructure is what sits beneath Drupal and helps GovCMS run the platform. Most of these changes will be invisible to our customers, and some have already started.
This new infrastructure will run in parallel with the current set-up. This means we’ll be able to make sure everything is up and running smoothly, before we remove the old infrastructure.
Hosting contract
GovCMS has begun early preparations to go back out to the market for our hosting contract, an activity we do every 3 years.
Last time we conducted this activity we sought the views of this community so that we were clear, not just about the technology, but also your appetite for innovation and change and, to understand what was important to you and your sites at that time. We issued a tender that encouraged creativity and innovation which resulted in us adopting a very modern kubernetes platform that had a high degree of resilience and scalability.
At the time we designed the tender we didn’t know a pandemic was imminent and that we would need every ounce of that scale and resilience. We have been thankful every day of COVID-19 that you gave us the support and encouragement to innovate and challenge how we deliver this platform through the design and evaluation process.
Once again, we are keen to have as much of the community involved as possible. If you’re interested in helping us shape the approach (be that a large or small contribution) - please get in touch.
Top Community Questions
What’s happening with the Drupal Services Panel?
The Drupal Services Panel is almost here, the last stages are just being finalised. The Department of Finance will be releasing the first batch of suppliers shortly, with more to follow not long after. Keep an eye on our website for more details.
I’m new to GovCMS and we need to completely change everything, the background, colours, styles, fonts, logos and so on. Is it possible for my agency to have full developer access to edit all aspects of our website?
Only PaaS customers can have full developer access to their GovCMS website. But you don’t need full developer access, or to be a fully skilled developer, to make most of those changes to your website.
If you’re a first-time user of the GovCMS platform, you can register for our Content Administration training to get the basics of Drupal. If you’re a bit more experienced with content management systems, or Drupal itself, you can register for Site Builder, which covers how to design and structure your website.
Full developer access not required.
Are there plans for GovCMS to deliver more training or training videos, such as how to deploy in GitLab?
GovCMS currently have two training courses and training manuals, Content Administration and Site Builder. In addition to these we have 22 short videos on Content Administration in GovCMS.
With so many aspects to Drupal and GovCMS, we’re definitely looking into creating more training to cover those things specific to GovCMS. So watch this space.
GovCMS also run events throughout the year, many of these are geared towards helping our community understand, and work with, the GovCMS platform.
At the moment GovCMS run regular Technical Workshops, one-hour walkthroughs on technical aspects of GovCMS.
Soon we’ll be adding another event series to the mix, covering more basic, less technical aspects of the GovCMS platform. Such as how to build a simple website, or set a site wide alert. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates.