City of Helsinki
Efficient and accessible content production through a flexible Drupal platform
The city of Helsinki’s Hel.fi web service is one of the largest websites in Finland. It contains approximately 500 000 pages in six languages. The site has approximately 2 million visitors per month with a yearly increase of about 10% in traffic.
The needs for the site revamp were manifold. The city wanted to switch to an open source platform that would facilitate continuous development. Drupal proved to be ideal for this purpose.
The goal was to create an accessible website both technically and in terms of content. There was a need to improve content findability, and content creation needed to be facilitated and partly automated.
The new Drupal platform enables efficient and effortless content production in an accessible manner, following the layout of the city’s design system. The platform also mitigates costs: with Drupal the city got rid of expensive licensing fees and instead received a universal content production platform.
Our role
Technical implementation and agile project management
Our proficient four-person development team got to work in the fall of 2020.
We are responsible for the technical implementation of the project. We have built a new universal Drupal platform that supports the new Hel.fi website. The pilot sections of the site have now been published.
In addition, we are strongly involved in the technical planning of the project as well as project management. We are building cooperation between the different actors in the project and facilitating the adoption of agile mode of operation and the Scrum method.
“Druid’s dependable team has added agility and a can-do attitude to the Hel.fi project. Druid’s developers acclimated themselves into the city’s IT management team very swiftly. They have been able to work efficiently within the city’s sometimes stiff administration system and have even been able to challenge us city workers to operate according to modern agile development models.”
Kalle Mikkolainen, Service Manager
What we do
New Drupal platform and Hel.fi website
The first version of the Drupal platform was released in June of 2021. We created universal components for the platform and deployed the design system used by the city of Helsinki, which added to the accessibility of the platform.
Since the platform provides a ready-to-use basic structure and layout, it will be easy for anyone to create new content and sites on top of it.
We integrated the city of Helsinki’s office and service registry into the platform. The information will be automatically updated to the required areas from the register which works as the master data. In addition we implemented a single sign-on authentication for the city’s workers.
The new Hel.fi project is progressing, and new sections have been published according to the schedule. Among other things, childhood and education, health and social services, mental health services, housing, strategy and economy pages as well as parking and cycling pages are already in use by city residents.
Our work with developing the Hel.fi website continues. The goal is to finish the project by the summer of 2023.
“It is really interesting for us to work on a project of this scope. We have been able to truly put our skills to the test and solve technical challenges as well as challenges relating to project management. Getting the agile method to work in a hierarchical organization has required some work but is paying dividends now.”
Arto Iijalainen, Scrum Master, Backend Developer
