Sector(s)
Project Team
East Suffolk Council; Code Enigma (design, development, hosting and support)
East Suffolk approached Code Enigma in December 2022 with a clear goal: to move their main council (gov.uk) website over to the LocalGov Drupal platform and build a platform they could understand, shape, and ultimately own. Through hands-on collaboration, they gained control of their Drupal platform. Code Enigma delivered the project across AWS, Design, Development, Hosting and Support.
About the project
East Suffolk's goal was to migrate their main council website to LocalGov Drupal with a platform they could understand, shape and own. The project was delivered through close, hands-on collaboration with Code Enigma, enabling East Suffolk to gain control of their Drupal platform.
In order to create a site that had the design and branding that East Suffolk needed a custom theme was created. This included a number of customisations of the main LocalGov Drupal templates and styles to suit the needs of the new site. Much of this custom design was focused on the header, footer, and home page elements as much of the LocalGov Drupal components available were already suitable for use.
East Suffolk received a number of team training sessions from Code Enigma on how to use both Drupal and the LocalGov Drupal components. This allowed the web team to understand the site and have the confidence to create and update content.
East Suffolk decided to migrate the content from the old site manually, which gave them the opportunity to perform a full content audit and allowed some restructuring of content. The training the team received and the use of a site to test out ideas meant that Drupal wasn’t a hurdle to this process.
One section that East Suffolk required that wasn’t on their previous site was a consultations section. Thanks to the training and documentation they were able to put together most of what was required quickly through Drupal content types and Views. Code Enigma assisted with the final touches here including the faceted search pages and some custom styles.
The outcomes
- A new LocalGov Drupal site that East Suffolk could fully control and understand.
- Very strong accessibility thanks to the LocalGov Drupal templates.
- The use of both Drupal and LocalGov Drupal community modules to add features to the site.
- A resilient hosting environment with automatic backups and deployments, managed by Code Enigma.
Why Drupal was chosen
East Suffolk picked LocalGov Drupal because it let them start from something already fit for local government and turn it into a site they genuinely control; with Code Enigma as a partner rather than a permanent dependency. Graham Tungate, their Web Development Manager, summed up the working relationship as "Code Enigma have been like part of the team throughout the project," adding that they "have never been phased by any requests we have thrown at them."
A key motivator in this choice was a LocalGov Drupal demo site, which was provided by Code Enigma prior to making the mode. This was a 30 day free trial of the system with some demo content installed to show how a typical LocalGov Drupal site might be created. This gave East Suffolk a playground that they could experiment with to see how the technology worked.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
East Suffolk specifically chose LocalGov Drupal as their target platform for the rebuild of their main council website. LocalGov Drupal is a shared, open-source distribution built by and for UK local government, which aligned with East Suffolk's aim to own and shape the platform rather than depend on proprietary tooling.
