Drupal at the heart of Citizen Engagement – A Restful tale from NSW State Library

The NSW State Library holds 67% of Australias historical records and a recent 50million project was established to digitise these assets and utilise web technologies to bring the collection into the modern day. Drupal formed a key part of the Libraries strategy as a web portal to access the libraries rich array of asset databases and the new content platform to help to showcase the thousands of stories that abound the Libraries historical collection. There started the long and arduous roads of decisions, solutions design, and the Libraries first lines of code contributed back into an Open Source Project. 

Key areas of contention where project timeline compared to the Drupal8 road map. The site needed to be launched by July which meant that their was no other stable choice but Drupal7. We had to ensure that the Drupal site could be accessed via Json with RestWS API, this was an important area to enabling Citizen Engadement  and data consumption from the site. Anoher big challenge was to build the site in a way that would facilitate a Drupal8 upgrade path and when/where to backport features.

This talk aims to take a look at the site architecture of the Libraries Drupal site to discuss the operational reasons behind why certain approaches where taken by the Library, complexities of building with a version of a software when the next one is around the corner, the pain and triumph of "There is a module for that" approach for an older code base. We will also discuss why these decisions where key to ensuring the site was accessible via Json was an important part of the Libraries Strategical approach to a new era of Citizen Engagement for the IT Department.