Come for the architecture, stay for the honest story. This session takes you inside the Government Drupal Platform, the recipe-driven foundation behind Dutch central government websites. What choices did we make, and would we make them again? Where does technical architecture meet the people who have to live with it? This is where developers and product owners sit in the same room and actually learn from each other.

Prerequisite

Familiarity with Drupal site building concepts is helpful, particularly an understanding of content types, configuration management, and the basics of Drupal recipes. Product owners and managers without a technical background are equally welcome: the session is structured so that both audiences can follow and take value from every part.

Target Audience

all

Outline

Everyone building a shared Drupal platform for government hits the same wall. Your stakeholders all think their case is the exception. Your roadmap is a battleground. And every release that makes one agency happy, can break something for another. Governments across Europe are wrestling with this and so did we.

When your platform becomes the preferred solution for an entire ministry, growth stops being optional. New users arrive with expectations, preferences, and sometimes reluctance.

DICTU's Government Drupal Platform provisions fully accessible, Rijksoverheid-branded government websites in under 10 minutes using 30+ recipes, aligned with Drupal CMS. Winner of the Drupal Splash Awards Government category 2025. One year in production by the time we take this stage.

A talk where technology and product management go hand in hand. Every technical decision shapes the experience of the people using it, and every lesson from users feeds directly back into the architecture.

We will show how we keep recipes composable and conflict-free, how CI/CD makes 10-minute provisioning possible, and how technical decisions ripple through to the editors who use them. We will share what reluctant users taught us, how early adopters became co-creators, and what we learned from those who walked away.

DrupalCon Rotterdam is our moment to give back. We are releasing new recipes for this event. Our design system is already public. Come and take it home.

Learning Objectives

You will learn how a recipe-driven architecture works at scale in a production government environment, including how we keep 30+ recipes composable and conflict-free. You will learn how a technology-agnostic design system connects a national design system to Drupal through a Figma-to-code pipeline. You will learn how CI/CD automation makes 10-minute site provisioning possible and what that requires in practice. You will gain insight into how technical decisions directly shape the experience of editors and end users. You will feel what it means to manage a shared platform when not all users chose it, including how reluctant users became a source of product improvement and how early adopters were turned into co-creators. And you will leave with concrete open source assets you can use immediately: recipes and a design system published openly for reuse.

Experience level
Anyone