City of Boston launches Boston.gov on Drupal

By Dries on 21 July 2016

Boston.gov homepage, scrolling gif

Yesterday, the City of Boston launched its new website, Boston.gov, on Drupal. Not only is Boston a city well-known around the world, it has also become my home over the past 9 years. That makes it extra exciting to see the city of Boston use Drupal.

As a company headquartered in Boston, I'm also extremely proud to have Acquia involved with Boston.gov. The site is hosted on Acquia Cloud, and Acquia led a lot of the architecture, development, and coordination. I remember pitching the project in the basement of Boston's City Hall, so seeing the site launched less than a year later is quite exciting.

The project was a big undertaking, as the old website was 10 years old and running on Tridion. The city's digital team, Acquia, IDEO, Genuine Interactive, and others all worked together to reimagine how a government can serve its citizens better digitally. It was an ambitious project as the whole website was redesigned from scratch in 11 months; from creating a new identity, to interviewing citizens, to building, testing and launching the new site.

Along the way, the project relied heavily on feedback from a wide variety of residents. The openness and transparency of the whole process was refreshing. Even today, the city made its roadmap public at http://roadmap.boston.gov and is actively encouraging citizens to submit suggestions. This open process is one of the many reasons why I think Drupal is such a good fit for Boston.gov.

Tell Us What You Think form, screenshot

More than 20,000 web pages and one million words were rewritten in a more human tone to make the site easier to understand and navigate. For example, rather than organize information primarily by department (as is often the case with government websites), the new site is designed around how residents think about an issue, such as moving, starting a business or owning a car. Content is authored, maintained, and updated by more than 20 content authors across 120 city departments and initiatives.

Screenshot of Towed Cars page

The new Boston.gov is absolutely beautiful, welcoming and usable. And, like any great technology endeavor, it will never stop improving. The City of Boston has only just begun its journey with Boston.gov—I’m excited see how it grows and evolves in the years to come. Go Boston!

Panel on stage at Boston.gov launch

Dries on stage at Boston.gov launch

Dries and Boston mayor, Marty Walsh

Last night, there was a launch party to celebrate the launch of Boston.gov. It was an honor to give some remarks about this project alongside Boston mayor, Marty Walsh (pictured above), as well as Lauren Lockwood (Chief Digital Officer of the City of Boston) and Jascha Franklin-Hodge (Chief Information Officer of the City of Boston).

Comments

Awesome !

simone960 commented 23 July 2016 at 00:05

Congrats ! The design is simple, clean and beautiful ~ I wonder what are the key modules of this website, especially when you mentioned "Content is authored, maintained, and updated by more than 20 content authors across 120 city departments and initiatives." I wonder if these modules are custom made or contributed modules already available in Drupal community to empower such a gov website. Well done anyway !

Magnificent

richienabuk commented 23 July 2016 at 10:43

Congratulations to the team that created such beautiful site.
It's beautiful and i love it.

verygood

khunchangvans commented 23 July 2016 at 14:50

Congratulations

Really nice site, love the

memmons commented 25 July 2016 at 14:01

Really nice site, love the clean simple design and the unobtrusive navigation. I notice when clicking around that some of the old site is still in place. Is there a road map for migrating the rest of the site?

we have a roadmap!

sugaroverflow commented 28 July 2016 at 13:59

Yes! We're planning to have larger discussions around the integrations before moving them over. You can check out http://roadmap.boston.gov/ for a high level overview of what we're doing next - and http://next.boston.gov/blog-updates/ for updates :)

That is really awesome,

memmons commented 3 August 2016 at 15:38

That is really awesome, congrats again.

A case study would be awesome.

mikeohara

He/Him

English

Moncton, NB

commented 25 July 2016 at 15:59

I'd love to know more about what went into the site. Drupal version/ major contrib modules, etc.

Drupal version 7

GreenSkunk

Great Valley, NY

commented 25 July 2016 at 20:33

From the source, it is Drupal 7.
A quick scan of the page source I can see that it uses the Paragraphs module.

"It is a damn poor day when you don't learn something!" - Mr. Jones, teacher

Yup!

sugaroverflow commented 28 July 2016 at 13:57

It's Drupal 7 and most of the content on the site was built with Paragraphs :)

HTML Attributes missing double quotes

GreenSkunk

Great Valley, NY

commented 25 July 2016 at 20:35

Does anyone else see that a lot of the HTML attributes are missing double quotes?
Example:

<div class=main-navigation>
<div class=main-navigation-wrapper>
<div class=main-navigation-title></div>
<div class="region region-navigation">
<div class="block block-menu-block first last odd" role=navigation id=block-menu-block-1>
<div class="menu-block-wrapper menu-block-1 menu-name-main-menu parent-mlid-0 menu-level-1">
<ul class=menu>

"It is a damn poor day when you don't learn something!" - Mr. Jones, teacher

It looks OK for me

imyaro commented 26 July 2016 at 03:23

@GreenSkunk
It looks OK for me
check your browser params

Which browser params would

alexrayu commented 4 August 2016 at 06:04

Which browser params would address this?

Confirmed in latest Chrome and Firefox

alexrayu commented 4 August 2016 at 06:06

Confirmed in latest Chrome (52) and Firefox (47). Seems like some quote marks can be missing from template files.

Great! to see that such an

roynilanjan commented 26 July 2016 at 06:29

Great! to see that such an important site is made with Drupal-7,
Drupal.settings shows the use of panel, views, genpass.
I assume most of the pages are built with panel & views it self and export to feature as usual :-).

Great

nerf-elite commented 26 July 2016 at 07:48

Congrats guys !

Awesome user interface.

hiramanpatil commented 27 July 2016 at 09:55

Awesome user interface. Visited some pages and loved the design.

Well done!

cj_schrunk commented 27 July 2016 at 13:31

Great work by everyone involved with this project. Another great example of how Drupal really shines. Very impressed with the development timeline.

Looks like Drupal 7 still rules!

izmeez commented 27 July 2016 at 15:46

Looks like Drupal 7 still rules!

I was wondering if this might be show case for Drupal 8, but not so.

Beautiful website

mrhoseah commented 1 August 2016 at 08:04

I congratulate the team that did the awesome job. Good job

Wow, Looking Great.

irudayarajisawa commented 1 August 2016 at 12:07

Wow, Looking Great.

Awesome work guys!!

mayurjadhav commented 2 August 2016 at 05:25

Congratulations, Awesome work guys!!

Beautiful Work

SmallAnvil commented 3 August 2016 at 03:16

Congrats on the move... and congrats to Drupal! I'll be digging through the CSS as usual... Very nice, clean look. Nice job guys.

Amazing!

swayzilla commented 3 August 2016 at 15:11

This is awesome! The site is great. I'm from the Boston Area and my University is moving over to Drupal. Hence the reason why I now learned / and still learning Drupal.

Congrats

nhanlq@outlook.com commented 4 August 2016 at 10:23

Congrats

Inspiring!

denuevojose commented 4 August 2016 at 18:43

Great! D

Congrats

harsh.behl commented 5 August 2016 at 09:50

The site is good, but there are few things that needs to taken care of:
1. On the feedback form server-side validation validating the email id is not there.

This is the first thing that I can see.

Thanks!

sugaroverflow commented 8 August 2016 at 14:14

Thanks for checking out the new Boston.gov !

I've added your feedback to our issue queue :)
In the future, you can send anything like that our way at feedback@boston.gov and we'll add it to our "fix list."