What is govCMS?
The govCMS distribution is supported in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 version, which has installation profiles for Australian government websites and it is being actively managed on Github and features are maintained from govcms.
To work with govCMS, we have to take care of some factors in order to create a site with the govCMS platform.
They have limited number of the module they support and we have to stick to that only and need to find alternate options with the twig and preprocess functions only and they do not allow us to create custom modules as well.
Here is the list of modules that they support:
Unfortunately supported modules for Drupal 8 are less compare to Drupal 7, but we can create support request of community and if it’s valid then they can include a module on SaaS platform.
Our Experience about working with govCMS
We have worked with govCMS for one of our clients from Australia, who is working with another agency before we met, and already he had started site development with them, and fortunately, he gets to know about the quality of work done so far from the previous agency.
They have added lots of contrib modules and to achieve some functionality they have created custom modules as well, but as the govCMS platform doesn’t support such modules we have to flush out all existing implementation and started from the beginning.
All features which are build using custom/contrib modules, we had to find alternatives and get things done only with supported modules and using preprocess functions and twig alters. and along with that, we have to make sure that site is WCAG compliance as it is a government website they must be. So all things we delivered to the client successfully as per the client’s expectation with the boundary of govCMS restriction.
More details about what is govCMS
Drupal gets big in the Australian Government
With almost half of Australian Government departments now running Drupal, and hundreds of more sites now live within various agencies, Drupal has transformed the way government websites are built and managed.
The aim is to provide a single solution for unclassified websites using a common codebase and a shared feature set on a scalable and secure list infrastructure.
govCMS distribution is supported as SaaS by amazeelabs in collaboration with govCMS community and it supports several contributed modules which are available, here is a list of modules which can be used with SaaS
Workflows and Ahoy
It is interesting to see that the .ahoy.yml is just a set of command shortcuts, which is similar to the scripts section of a composer.json. Every implementation can be smoothed over by a single Ahoy command, and the underlying implementation can evolve without the developer even noticing.
Speculating, I think the hardest part about adding Ahoy commands will be naming them. Even then, the govCMS team will have the luxury of focussing on the “SaaS govcms 8 on Lagoon” use case, rather than something like BLT which attempts to have commands for “any Drupal anywhere”.
