The Museum of Australian Democracy (MoAD) engaged Digital Garden as its ongoing Drupal partner to support, maintain and evolve its Drupal 10 digital platform.
Alongside continuous improvement of the primary website, the engagement included consolidating three standalone microsites into Drupal, improving accessibility and navigation, and applying MoAD’s refreshed visual identity across the digital experience.
The result is a more cohesive and maintainable digital ecosystem that brings historical, collection and educational content together within a scalable Drupal platform.
About the project
The Museum of Australian Democracy required an ongoing digital partner to support and evolve its Drupal 10 platform while simplifying a broader digital ecosystem that had become increasingly fragmented.
Digital Garden provides ongoing Drupal maintenance, security management, accessibility improvement, UX and interface refinement, performance optimisation and quality assurance.
A significant part of the engagement involved consolidating three standalone microsites into MoAD’s primary Drupal platform.
Election Speeches brought historical election speech content into the broader Democracy section, supported by improved content structures, filtering and search.
Oral Histories was restructured within the Collections section, with improved tagging, simplified media playback and more intuitive navigation.
Getting it Together brought educational resources and learning materials into MoAD’s broader Learning Activities and Resources experience, creating clearer pathways for teachers and students.
The consolidation required new Drupal content types, templates and taxonomies, together with content migration planning and automation. This allowed content from different legacy systems to become part of a common structured-content environment rather than simply recreating the existing microsites.
Digital Garden also applied and extended MoAD’s refreshed visual identity across the website, creating a more consistent digital experience.
The result is a more unified, accessible and maintainable Drupal ecosystem that reduces fragmentation and provides a scalable foundation for MoAD’s collections, educational resources and public-facing content.
Why Drupal was chosen
MoAD’s primary website was already established on Drupal, providing a strong foundation for the organisation’s evolving digital requirements.
Drupal’s structured content architecture, taxonomy and flexible content modelling made it particularly well suited to consolidating several standalone microsites containing very different types of content.
Rather than continuing to maintain fragmented platforms, MoAD could bring historical records, oral histories and educational resources into a common Drupal environment while creating content structures tailored to each collection.
Drupal also provides the security, accessibility, permissions and content management capabilities required by a major Australian cultural institution, together with the flexibility to continue evolving the platform over time.
