govCMS — the cloud-hosted, Drupal-based content management system for federal government departments and agencies — has added new features that make it easier for government organisations to syndicate their content to other sites.
The new service is based on Acquia’s Content Hub. Acquia, which operates govCMS under contract with the Department of Finance, launched Content Hub last year.
“Content Hub lets authors and site owners reuse content from other sites, commerce platforms, and more,” Acquia’s CTO, Drupal creator Dries Buytaert, wrote in a launch announcement.
“To facilitate sharing between all these different systems, we normalize the content, and provide centralized tools to search and discover content within your network of sites. In addition, Content Hub can automatically keep content consistent across different sites (publish-subscribe), mitigating the risk of out of date information, all while respecting workflow rules on the local destination site.”
The API-based system will allow an agency that uses govCMS to import content from outside of the CMS as well as export it to other systems run by the agency or to third parties.
The syndication system means that changes to a piece of content will be rolled out across other sites that publish it, a govCMS statement said.
govCMS is a CMS-as-a-service offering hosted and maintained by Acquia under a four-year contract. The CMS officially launched in March last year.
By early December, 50 government websites had been migrated to the CMS, according to the govCMS team.
Sites running on the platform include Finance.gov.au, Australia.gov.au and the main websites of the Department of Social Services and the Department of Human Services.
The CMS has been primarily designed for brochure-style informational websites, but on 15 December govCMS announced a platform-as-a-service option for bespoke Drupal sites.