Inside Los Angeles' Move to Drupal

In this session, we will showcase the City of Los Angeles project to transform their existing government service sites into a manageable Drupal based platform. We will show how this project tackled major goals of internal maintainability, repurposing existing data sources, and minimizing disruption across a diverse range of departments and sites.

As part of any complex city government migration, many technical and political hurdles need to be overcome. Some highlights that will be discussed include:

• The background of the project and historical infrastructure.
• The planning and agile development process, and collaboration between the Los Angeles internal technology team and development partners.
• Development of a common city-wide site platform.
• Cataloging back-end data sources and planning integration points and approaches.
• Supporting data feeds of various types from multiple sources.
• Creating streamlined interfaces for content managers who are not Drupal developers.
• Coordinating training of staff to become Drupal content managers.
• Choosing a hosting and deployment platform to ensure reliability, performance, and a source controlled environment.
• Baking accessibility into both the site and editorial tools.