Government of Canada CLF 2 Theme Available

Posted by leehunter on October 28, 2007 at 9:09pm

I've created a theme which adheres fairly closely to Common Look and Feel 2.0. The only significant difference is that the top menu bar, which is force-justified in CLF 2 using fussy percentages for each item, is left-justified in this theme. If you really needed the exact look, you could work around this by doing the menu in plain HTML and swapping it via PHP for bilingual sites. Or if anyone knows how to do this within PHPTemplate, I'd appreciate it if you could let me know.

There's a readme.txt file packaged with the theme that has important information about what was changed and about what you have to do to set it up properly.

This theme has only had a very quick test with FF and IE 7 (I just threw it together over the last couple of days), but I'm thinking it should work reasonably well, since it basically just gives you whatever is in the CLF 2 templates plus some basic CMS goodness (dynamic 2 and 3 column layouts etc.). It doesn't give you all the different versions of CLF, but if you need some of those variations, you'll be off to a flying start.

I'm a bit hesitant about posting it to the Drupal site since I don't actually have TB approval to go messing with CLF let alone distribute my own version, but if anyone wants a copy you can drop me a line (lee dot hunter at hum dot com).

Comments

Sample?

Posted by jmlane on October 29, 2007 at 10:55pm

Do you have a link to a sample site?

Jonathan M. Lane
OpenConcept Consulting Inc. http://www.openconcept.ca/

Jonathan M. Lane

Sample?

Posted by leehunter on October 29, 2007 at 11:39pm

No I don't but other than the Drupal-specific menus, it doesn't look much different than any CLF 2 site, http://www.tbs-sct.gc.ca/clf2-nsi2/index-eng.asp for example.

Any government dep. using Drupal as their Web Content Mgt Tool?

Posted by papiguy on September 29, 2008 at 6:30pm

We are looking into getting a Web CMS to help with the maintenance of our Web sites. Is there any government department in Ottawa using Drupal with CLF 2. It would be nice to see it working, if possible.

We've Set Up Drupal in 4 GoC Departments So Far

Posted by mgifford on September 29, 2008 at 6:37pm

Not all of them are using CLF 2.0 Themes though. We're fine with sharing the theme we've developed to people within the GoC, however we've heard some concerns about distributing it beyond that. I've suggested that the theme be available within the government with a shared repository so that it can be continually enhanced and distributed. Haven't heard about if that project is going to go through or not though. We're implementing Drupal 6 sites for most of these projects.

Would be interested in hearing more, so please send me a note. At there first Drupal meet-up here in Ottawa we had quite good attendance from within the GoC. Need to organize another one asap!

Mike

OpenConcept | WLP | prax.ca

--
OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide

Interested in knowing more about Dupral

Posted by papiguy on September 29, 2008 at 6:51pm

It would be great if we could have more details on how it went for these Gov. sites.

Thanks

CLF 2 is not the problem

Posted by leehunter on September 29, 2008 at 8:37pm

The CLF 2 theme for Drupal is not too big a deal. I did mine without any previous theming experience, modest CSS chops and no previous exposure to CLF. (I'm sure an experienced themer would do a MUCH better job.) It seemed that whatever problems I had with CLF 2 would have been there no matter what I was using on the back end. Actually the only thing I couldn't do at all was to get the items in the top navigation bar to have the fussy equal spacing that they have in CLF 2 but that's not a limitation of Drupal, it's more a question of whether I would break down and hard code the spaces in HTML/CSS (as they do in the CLF 2 samples) or do a more typical left-aligned CMS-style menu so that it could be dynamically changed without breaking (I opted for the latter but there's probably some way of doing both with the right CSS).

The one thing I'm really curious about is how Drupal would scale in a large department - not scale in the sense of server load but how you'd deploy it in a way that gives you the right balance of consistency and control versus flexibility: keeping the same look and feel throughout the site, deploying some common content types, but allowing branches the flexibility to customize things to meet their needs.

I've heard it suggested that Plone, since it's based on the Zope object-oriented database, is better for this kind of large and diverse deployment than Drupal. I'd be interested to know how DND made out with their Drupal deployment and whether this was an issue for them.

Solutions and Size

Posted by mgifford on September 30, 2008 at 6:32pm

Hi Lee,

Our CLF uses Drupal menus for that top navigation bar. Makes it pretty flexible for our users. It is so much nicer to have that information just modifiable through the system than to have to edit the page.tpl.php file.

Would be useful to explore the use cases and requirements that would be needed across a large department. I am sure that there are ways of doing this well using organic groups to give sections restricted access and provide the right degree of access and flexibility. Alternatively there are so nice multi-site solutions out there that would allow you to link certain tables, but have areas where there is a completely different set of features. This would be different for department though. Just having one CLF theme available in a multi-ste would ensure that there is a consistent look/feel within the department. Within that the navigation could change as could the content types, blocks, etc for each different implementation. Would be great to see the government implement http://openid.net/ aswell to ensure that there is consistency across a department. Although integration with LDAP is also an option.

Drupal can quite easily scale for large and complex projects. Plone has some advantages too. Frankly the fact that the CIA has adopted Plone for their public website has done a great deal to dispose of the FUD around security of open source. That being said, you'd really need to have a solid understanding of how a department would like to use their website before making a decision like this. One of the charms of Drupal is that it is easy to start small and build to the needs of the users.

Mike

OpenConcept | Volunteer Canada | prax.ca

--
OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide

Our government clients are very happy with Drupal

Posted by mgifford on September 29, 2008 at 7:54pm

Our clients have been completely amazed by the functionality that comes out of the box with Drupal. By default Drupal is considerably more user friendly and customizable than most websites used within the government of Canada. The ability to just set up a demo using Drupal and experiment with options also ends up being far less expensive and time consuming than the normal waterfall software development method so prevelant within large bureaucracies. The opportunities for cross department collaboration are also very exciting.

OpenConcept | Volunteer Canada | prax.ca

--
OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide

GoC and Drupal

Posted by PMatwyuk on September 30, 2008 at 7:07pm

I was one of those GoC guys at the meet up. I doubt very much we'll see Drupal being used anytime soon as a platform for external websites by the government as it poses risks since it is database driven, risks no government agency would want.

Internally however is another story, we're slowly working on launching a new web platform with it, and all of are early runs have been highly succesful with only the CLF2.0 giving us the harder times. I've downloaded and used two CLF themes. The first one I used had a lot of errors and wouldn't even display the data right, the second one required a lot of modification and is extreamly overweight in the sense that it has way too many css files and extras.

I finally got fed up with the second which tries to mimic the TBS templates and have started to create my own using the garland theme. Once it is completed and adhere's 100% to the CLF 2.0 standards it will be submitted to the TBS so it can be uploaded to their site for other drupal users to have.

Database driven?

Posted by leehunter on September 30, 2008 at 7:39pm

I'm surprised that you'd say that Drupal wouldn't be used for an external site because it's database driven. I'm not involved in creating GoC external sites but I would have assumed that most, if not all, external GoC sites were already using some kind of database-driven CMS. I can't imagine delivering that much content any other way.

CLF 2.0 Discussion Site in Drupal

Posted by mgifford on December 18, 2008 at 5:09am

We've set up the following discussion site for implementation of CLF 2.0. Right now we're focusing on open source tools like Drupal, Trac, & WordPress, but are open for general discussions about the challenges of implementing the more accessible government web sites. If you're interested in looking at cost effective ways to collaborate, please sign up at our CLF 2.0 discussion site.

This is set up with a CLF 2.0 theme we've been extending and will make available upon request. It's actually based on LeeHunter's theme, so thanks Lee!