Basauri

Ever wondered how a city like Basauri can efficiently manage its diverse community services and digital presence? With Drupal, the Basauri Town Hall found the perfect solution.

A thorough and necessary update

The Basauri Town Hall (Ayuntamiento de Basauri) is the municipal governing body of Basauri, a city located in the Basque Country of Spain. Tasked with managing various civic services such as public safety, urban planning, and social welfare, the Town Hall is dedicated to enhancing the community’s quality of life. The town needed a robust and scalable website to centralize management, modernize its digital presence, and better engage with its citizens.

Drupal was chosen to build a flexible and scalable solution that could serve multiple portals, support complex content management, ensure high levels of security, and provide seamless integration with other administrative services.

Why Drupal Powered Basauri’s Vision

Drupal emerged as the ideal choice for Basauri due to a myriad of features and capabilities that perfectly aligned with the project's requirements: 

• Flexibility on Pages Composition and Customization: Drupal's architecture allows for the construction of highly customized pages and layouts. This flexibility is vital for the varied needs of municipal websites, where diverse types of pages (news, regulations, grants) and sections must coexist.
• Modular Flexibility: Drupal’s modular design allows for easy integration of new features without disrupting the existing framework. For Basauri, this means being able to add new functionalities as needed, such as event management or social media integration, through contributed modules.
• Content Management and Moderation: Drupal offers a robust content management system that supports complex workflows for content creation, moderation, and publication. This feature is essential for managing the diverse types of content published by Basauri Town Hall.
• Scalability: Drupal can handle a high volume of traffic and large amounts of content, making it suitable for municipalities with extensive data and numerous site visitors.
• Security: Drupal has a strong track record for security, providing regular updates and patches to guard against vulnerabilities. This is particularly important for a government entity handling sensitive information.
• Multilingual Support: With built-in multilingual capabilities, Drupal can manage content in multiple languages with ease, ensuring accessibility for all residents of Basauri who speak Basque and Spanish.
• SEO Friendliness: Drupal’s clean code, semantic tagging, and numerous SEO modules help ensure that the Basauri website performs well in search engine rankings.
• Accessibility and Usability: Drupal supports the latest web accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1), ensuring that the site is usable by all citizens, including those with disabilities.
• Integration Capabilities: Drupal’s flexible APIs and numerous integration modules make it easy to connect with other systems and applications, such as Basauri’s administrative databases and event management tools.
• Multisite Capabilities: Drupal’s multisite feature allows for the management of multiple sites from a single codebase, providing a streamlined way to handle Basauri’s various portals and microsites.

Transforming content management: How VLSuite revolutionized Basauri City Council's digital presence.

One of the key elements of the Basauri City Council project was a complete overhaul of content development and management. The Drupal core content management system configured to accommodate the necessary taxonomies, categories and content types, such as “News”, “Municipal Regulations”, “Ordinances” and “Subsidies”, was the key piece to this. The system easily supports publishing and approval workflows, scheduled content publishing and the creation of new pages and sections. But all of this has been amplified to new limits, thanks to the creation of the VLsuite.

Based on Drupal Core's Layout Builder, VLSuite was designed to offer a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) experience at both the layout and content level. This feature allows for real-time previewing of appearance variants, significantly enhancing the editor experience beyond what Drupal core offers. By integrating icon fonts for so-called 'utility classes' and other components, and enabling animation at the section or block level, VLSuite provides a dynamic and engaging way to manage content. Editors can create and reuse entire site sections or layouts using a layout library, which greatly improves the efficiency of content production.

In addition, VLSuite incorporates tiered user permissions, allowing different levels of content editing in Basauri depending on the user's role. Each utility can be marked as “advanced” or not, making the package suitable for different levels of expertise. Unlike other solutions, VLSuite does not depend on a specific distribution, profile or theme, and has an optional dependency on Bootstrap 5 for out-of-the-box functionality. Its compatibility with other approaches powered by Layout Builder ensures that it could be seamlessly integrated into the existing workflow. In addition, the preconfigured utilities made it easy for editors to start working immediately after feature assignment.

This flexibility and ease of use allowed Basauri City Council to manage and create content efficiently, ultimately resulting in a more dynamic and user-friendly digital presence.

Crafting Basauri’s Digital Landscape

Apart from content management, the Basauri project embarked on a comprehensive overhaul of the municipal website, encompassing a wide array of goals and requirements. 

The initial phase involved designing the website architecture, which included developing a comprehensive sitemap and wireframe. A responsive user interface optimized for various devices was crafted, accompanied by a structured menu system to enhance user navigation. A major task was the migration of contents from the old Drupal 6 website, ensuring that existing information was seamlessly transitioned to the new platform. Additionally, an effective search functionality was incorporated to help users quickly locate relevant information.

Centralized management was a key focus, as the project aimed to unify the administration of the various portals and websites associated with the Basauri Town Hall and its dependent autonomous bodies. This included the creation of scalable, 'vertical' websites and the flexibility to develop microsites with customizable sidebars, headers, menus, and footers. Given the municipality's reliance on information stored in corporate databases from administrative applications (such as grants and registers of associations), integration capabilities were paramount. The need to synchronize and integrate content from other applications and services on the municipal portal led to the development of the External Entities Field Processors module by Metadrop.

Seamless integration with other municipal applications was another key requirement. These included the NOIZ event management application, the integration of which was essential. This application provides a web service that allows municipal websites to display detailed event agendas. The integration facilitated the consumption of data through this service by positioning it as a module within the CMS that identified different types of metadata provided by the WS.

Personalization of content was also a notable requirement, with features to serve personalized content based on predefined user profiles. An intranet site, separate from the multisite architecture, was developed with its own unique configurations. User roles and permissions were meticulously defined to ensure that content editors and administrators had appropriate access levels for publishing, deleting, and modifying information.

Multilingual support was a critical requirement, as the website needed to cater to both Basque and Spanish-speaking residents. This involved managing a large volume of content in two languages, facilitated by the creation of the entity translations helper module. The project also needed to support the inclusion of multimedia content and allow for the upload of various document types (with FTP integration).

Incorporating social media integration was another crucial aspect, enabling the embedding of social media feeds on key pages and fostering collaboration and conversation with citizens through surveys, comments, and discussion forums. 

SEO optimization was meticulously addressed to ensure the website adhered to best practices for improving search engine rankings. This included implementing meta tags, schema.org markup, and mobile-friendly optimizations. Web positioning and the integration of social media sharing features were also included. Analytics were integrated using Matomo to monitor site usage and origins of web traffic.

Finally, accessibility and compliance with GDPR (RGPD) regulations were non-negotiable requirements. The website was designed to fully comply with WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards. Extensions were developed to ensure compliance with cookie regulations and GDPR standards, safeguarding the privacy of subscribers browsing the portals.

In sum, the Basauri project delivered a sophisticated, robust, and user-friendly digital experience for the Basauri Town Hall, meeting all specified functional and technical requirements while also contributing valuable tools and modules to the Drupal community.

Essential Tools and Integrations Empowering Basauri

The Basauri project leveraged a variety of specialized modules to create a highly functional and user-friendly platform. 

One of the cornerstone modules was Visual Layout Suite (VLSuite), which revolutionizes page-building by providing drag-and-drop capabilities. This made it incredibly easy for non-technical users to create and manage complex layouts, facilitating landing page creation, custom template development, and the reuse of content blocks.

Another key module was Matomo Analytics (matomo_analytics), which integrated Matomo’s advanced analytics capabilities into Drupal. This allowed for comprehensive visitor statistics, user-friendly dashboards, and a privacy-compliant solution for tracking and reporting website traffic. 

The Webform module was vital in enabling the creation of custom forms and surveys, making it possible to build anything from simple contact forms to intricate applications, and providing features for data collection, submission analysis, and reporting.

To ensure that the site met high standards for performance, security, and SEO, the X-Ray Audit (xray_audit) module was used. This module conducted thorough audits and provided detailed reports and recommendations. 

The XNTT manager (xnttmanager) helped to manage and integrate external entities, ensuring seamless synchronization between Drupal and various administrative applications. To further improve this synchronization, the External Entities Field Processors module was developed and played a crucial role. It  facilitated synchronization of data between Drupal and external databases and provided custom field types to handle this external data seamlessly.

For enhanced search capabilities, Search API Solr and Facets (search_api_solr) was utilized. This module enabled fast and efficient search indexing and querying, and offered faceted search capabilities to refine search results.

For displaying events and other date-based content, the Calendar View (calendar_view) module provided intuitive monthly, weekly, and daily views, seamlessly integrating with other content types for comprehensive event management. 

Finally, the Entity Translations Helper (entity_translations_helper) module was created to simplify the process of managing translations for the multilingual site, ensuring consistent and accurate content delivery in both Basque and Spanish.

Contributing to the Drupal Community

Throughout the course of the Basauri project, significant contributions were made to the Drupal community.

 One of the major contributions was the Visual Layout Suite developed to provide a user-friendly and versatile platform for managing and creating content. 

Additionally, the External Entities Field Processors module was created to meet the requirements of integrating content from other applications and services. 

Finally, the Entity Translations Helper Module was developed to assist with managing translations between Basque and Spanish. 

These contributions demonstrate our commitment to enhancing the Drupal ecosystem while delivering a high-quality digital experience for the Basauri Town Hall.

The Basauri Town Hall’s digital transformation : a testament to the power and flexibility of Drupal. 

The Basauri Town Hall’s digital transformation is a testament to the power and flexibility of Drupal. By centralizing content management, integrating external applications, and providing multilingual and personalized content, Drupal has empowered the Town Hall to better serve its citizens. If your organization is seeking a scalable, secure, and flexible solution, Drupal might just be the right choice.

Ready to take your digital presence to the next level? Contact us today to discuss how we can help you build a platform as dynamic and robust as Basauri's.