DriveTurku
Starting point
The city of Turku wanted to renovate its ten year old web services. The goals consisted of versatile web communications, an adaptive mobile device support, and easy to use services, which would enable the people of Turku to transact with the city. Druid was chosen through competitive tendering as one of the three DriveTurku program’s vendors that would co-operate with the city to build the new system.
What we did
We built Turku’s web services in a multi-vendor project. In six months a flexible Drupal platform was implemented, which allows Turku to build and publish new responsive theme and brand centric websites with just a few clicks without using a single line of code. The platform supports mobile devices and, for example, utilizes the user’s geographical information when able.
Results
The web sites were published July 1st 2015. At the time of publication, there were approximately 20 websites built on top of the platform by about 10 vendors. In addition, there were approximately 150 content creators. By switching to Drupal, the city of Turku was able use the money freed from license payments to improve services.
For Druid’s part the DriveTurku project began on September 2014 in a meeting, where the chosen vendors and Turku’s representatives planned the upcoming service. The multivendor method chosen by the city worked well: groups of professionals worked together towards a common goal and built functionality by auditing each other’s code.
The web service overhaul consisted of building a custom Drupal platform on which the admins would be able to independently create sites that would fit the city’s brand image. Even though the theme for the various sites is common to a certain extent, each service could be made to look independent by customizing the color theme and choosing the most apt components to use, like carousels, promoted posts and other widgets. In addition, content can easily be shared between the city’s different sites. As a part of the project, we modernized the city’s event calendar to be presented by district.
The platform has been widely used from its publication. Some of the web services built on top of it include sites for the city of Turku, Turku Castle, South-West Finland’s emergency services, Turku City Theatre and Turku Vocational Institute.
