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By SIMBIOSE on
Official Web Site of Seixal Municipality.
This site stands for permanent update and interactivity, connection to social networks and online services. Built in Drupal with responsive design to adapt to different devices. The design is flat, clean and modern with an easy navigation.
Reference web site for local government in Portugal.
Why Drupal was chosen:
First of all because Drupal is open source. We recognized that our expensive proprietary CMS would not provide a long-term enterprise content management solution and Seixal Municipality wanted to avoid expensive license fees and improve our own staff knowledge in Drupal.
Also because the benchmarking told us that the development in Drupal, working with modules, can be faster, secure but also flexible.
Last because Drupal is well proven and is being used by numerous companies and organizations including government.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
By using Drupal our team devised a strategy to migrate, rebuild, redesign, and support contents from different platforms discontinued and updated the main content management system.
The main purpose of the restructuring and redesign of the website (UX & UI design) was focus on the user experience.
We kept the following objectives:
• The content (text and images) are the main protagonists;
• Less is more: Reduce the maximum visual elements that can "distract" the user;
• Mobile first;
• The choice of flat design to make the most "clean" as possible website and value the relevant content (text + picture);
• The use of free tools: Font: Robotto; the icons: Font Awesome; the Share: ShareThis; video: Youtube;
the Photo: flickr; Maps: Google Maps;
• Bet on visual icons for navigation
• In UI we bet on the vertical reading. The main objective is led the user by order of importance of the content through the scroll;
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Breakpoints – Used in conjunction with Picture module.
Calendar - Used for search and information on events area.
Date - This module is used on the events to set begin and end dates.
Display Suite - We used Display Suite to arrange how the content id displayed.
Entity Reference – Used to relate content types (e.g. Events are related to Equipments).
FlexSlider – This modules is used to generate the main website slider. Flexslider provides a good responsive slider with touch capabilities.
I18n – Provides multilingual capabilities necessary as the website contents are in Portuguese language.
ImageAPI Optimize - Used to optimize image quality and file size.
Leaflet – Used to generate the maps displayed in Equipments, Events, etc.
Omega - The development team had very good experiences using Omega so it was just natural to use it as the base for the site’s theme. Omega allows for subthemes creation and provides a very good base for developing fully responsive themes.
Picture - Makes the appropriate image style to be used according to device resolution (e.g, smartphones do not need big resolutions images) improving website performance.
Rabbit Hole - Very useful for hiding stuff we don’t want to show. For instance, we do not want to show the Slider content and individual nodes.
Superfish - Used on the main menus. It’s a good tool for creating fully responsive menus and also provides touch functionality.
Views - Views is used for all the main area pages and for content block (e.g. related articles).
Workbench - Provides a unified interface for users that only work with content.
Workbench moderation - Used for editorial workflow and content moderation.
Current total number of modules used:
147 contributed modules
4 custom modules
1 custom theme
Libraries:
Ckeditor
easing
editarea
Community contributions:
All team members are aware of the advantages of sharing knowledge. Some of the team members have planned work on the translation of the Drupal 8 for Portuguese . Symbiosis is also a member of the Drupal Association (https://assoc.drupal.org/membership/organizations?country=1173).
Organizations involved:
Project team:
This project team was coordinated by Rute Mendes and included two project managers, Ricardo Saleiro and António Ranita, one web designer, Fernando Sousa, two system engineers, Luis Milheiriço and Pedro Costa and two developers from Simbiose.com, Hugo Trovão and Pedro Dias.
Sectors:
Government
