Sector(s)
The Department of Education’s Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) State Plan Portal is a Drupal-based content management system that supports the creation, review, and management of state plans for all 50 states and 7 territories. The platform leverages Drupal core functionality, contributed modules, and custom-developed code to streamline collaboration between state and federal stakeholders. The primary challenge was maintaining a highly available, secure, and scalable platform capable of supporting complex workflows and continuous usage across multiple federal stakeholders while meeting strict government IT and cybersecurity requirements.
Under this effort, the Nationwide IT Services team partnered with the Department of Education and the Department of Labor in 2024 to provide comprehensive operations and maintenance support for the WIOA State Plan Portal. This support includes full lifecycle management of the platform, encompassing ongoing development, maintenance, and enhancement of the website, user resources, interfaces, databases, search functionality, user roles and permissions, reporting, and notification capabilities.
About the project
Goals:
This effort focused on maintaining the reliability, security, and availability of the Department of Education’s WIOA State Plan Portal. The work provided comprehensive operations and maintenance support to ensure the Drupal-based platform remained fully functional, accessible, and adaptable to evolving program and technical requirements for state and federal users.
Requirements:
The effort required implementing a secure, scalable, and highly customizable digital platform capable of supporting complex content structures and high user traffic while meeting federal expectations for security, reliability, and performance. The platform needed to support advanced configuration and customization to address evolving mission and business needs, including granular user roles and permissions, flexible content modeling, and native multilingual capabilities to manage diverse content and user groups. In addition, the solution was required to scale efficiently, integrate with additional tools and services, and support long-term maintainability through strong open-source community and enterprise backing.
Outcome:
Through sustained operations and maintenance support, the platform delivered stable, reliable, and uninterrupted service for state and federal users. Stakeholder-driven enhancements were implemented while maintaining full compliance with government IT, cybersecurity, and Authority to Operate (ATO) requirements. Continuous monitoring and proactive maintenance ensured the system remained secure, resilient, and fully functional.
The effort improved operational efficiency by streamlining content management, user workflows, and administrative processes, reducing the level of effort required to maintain and update the platform. As a result, state and federal users were able to more efficiently create, review, and manage WIOA state plans, while the system remained scalable and adaptable to evolving program requirements and long-term mission needs.
Why Drupal was chosen
The platform was selected based on its established reliability and secure foundation. To ensure optimal functionality, performance, and long-term support,
the team upgraded the platform to align with current Drupal standards and evolving program requirements.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
The selected modules, themes, and distributions were chosen based on the team’s deep knowledge and experience with the Drupal ecosystem, enabling efficient development, maintenance, and long-term support. Strong community and enterprise backing ensure regular updates, security patches, and ongoing innovation.
The solution prioritizes security through well-supported, widely adopted components while maintaining simplicity in administration and content management. Together, these elements provide a scalable and highly customizable platform capable of supporting evolving requirements, future enhancements, and long-term sustainability.
