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Our Drupal Team at Digitaal Vlaanderen

Marjorie

Marjorie De Schepper

PR & Marketing

The Drupal developers at Digitaal Vlaanderen work on the Drupal CMS of vlaanderen.be. Our colleague Yves works with the Drupal team to optimise the CMS, fix bugs and add extra functionality.  

digitaal-vlaanderen

An optimal Drupal CMS for vlaanderen.be

The team at vlaanderen.be uses Drupal CMS to manage the information on their website. In this case, Drupal mainly serves as an editorial environment, while the front-end of vlaanderen.be is a website application written in Vue.js. This ensures that an intermediate layer is also needed to send data from the back-end to the front-end. This layer or 'content gateway' (written in Node.js) maps the information in Drupal to the needs of the front-end.  

The Drupal CMS thus acts as the back-end, with the team paying close attention to the user experience for the website editors.

A custom back-end for websites with many pages

1

User experience first

What makes the backend theme of vlaanderen.be completely custom? First of all, we paid attention to a number of important aspects to improve the usability of the CMS. For example, custom paragraphs have been developed so that editors can create and move blocks of content quickly and easily.  

2

Efficient and secure publishing process with content moderation 

We also implemented content moderation with a draft-publish-archive publishing process. Content moderation gives editors more control over the content published on the site. A draft-publish-archive flow ensures that content is only published online after it has been approved. This prevents errors and unintentional publishing, improving the quality of the site: 

  • Improved collaboration between editors from different departments: By moderating content, different editors can contribute and the information can ultimately be compiled into a high-quality final product. 
  • Improved security: With a draft-publish-archive flow, editors can prevent unauthorised people from publishing or editing content. It also prevents the accidental removal of site content. This ensures a safer and more reliable publishing process. 
  • Increased efficiency: Optimising the workflow streamlines the publishing process. This saves time and money, which is particularly important for organisations with a large number of pages to manage, such as Digital Flanders' websites.
3

SOLR integration for advanced search of your site's content 

We have integrated SOLR search because SOLR is optimised to quickly search large amounts of data. This means that editors can quickly search through website content and find the information they need. SOLR also offers advanced search capabilities, making it easier for editors to find and filter specific information based on various criteria. 

But that's not all - we also use external entities, for example, to index job postings in SOLR so that editors can easily find and use them on their pages. 

Did you know?

... that Calibrate is an officially recognized service provider of Digitaal Vlaanderen?

dv

The Calibrate Drupal team fixing bugs and adding features

We almost forget, but a lot of hard work goes into testing the new features. For example, the Drupal team provides the necessary links to other systems, such as IPDC, via API connections. 

Unit tests are written for every new feature, so that everything can be tested automatically on every deployment. And a ticket must be reviewed by the whole team before it is allowed to go into the test environment. 

In summary, Drupal CMS is a powerful tool for managing the content of large websites such as government sites. We play our part by constantly tweaking and improving this site.

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