Unlocking the Power of Structured Content with Drupal on Iowa.gov

Matt Kleve: For July 6th, 2023, it's the Lullabot podcast.

[Intro music]

Matt Kleve: Hey everybody, it's the Lullabot podcast, episode 262. I'm Matt Kleve, a senior developer at Lullabot, and today we're talking about content. Get your content, structured content and a big project that Lullabot has been working on recently. And when I want to talk about content, the person I usually bring in is Lullabot's director of strategy. He led the so-called CMI initiative for Drupal eight. He's a world class pinball player, been on Drupal.org for 16 years from Monterey, California. Greg Dunlap. Hi, Greg.

Greg Dunlap: Hey, Matt. How's it going?

Matt Kleve: Great. Glad you're here.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah.

Matt Kleve: And with us, we have a Lullabot client. She's the eGovernment Services Coordinator and project manager with the office of the Chief Information Officer with the State of Iowa. Dawn Connet. Hi, Dawn.

Dawn Connet: Hello. Glad to be here today.

Matt Kleve: And so that everybody's clear, I'm actually on this project as well. So the three of us and many other people have been working to do a lot of things for the state of Iowa and iowa.gov websites recently. Right?

Dawn Connet: Absolutely.

Matt Kleve: If you could kind of just take us through like what's what's happening with Iowa.gov these days.

Dawn Connet: Well, the state currently has each agency with their own website and their own separate set of code base. And what the governor has a major initiative to improve the constituents' experience. We want the websites to look and feel and function in a similar way, so that it's not jarring for a constituent who needs to go in and learn about paying for unemployment tax, or to pay for sales tax, or to submit their license, or learn about their license information for a professional license. And so we selected Lullabot as a vendor to work with and help us come together with a single design across the enterprise. And we launched this initiative last fall and launched Iowa.Gov in January with our first set of content and content types, along with the governor's office. And now we're working through a list of about 50 sites over the next 18 months to to bring everybody together and improve that constituent experience.

Matt Kleve: So it's it's great for the constituent experience, but I like to think about it from like an IT support kind of thing. If you have that many different agencies running lots of different technologies and versions of things. That's that's a pain to begin with too, right?

Dawn Connet: Absolutely. And it's hard for the content editors because everybody's experience is a little bit different. It's not a consistent experience on the back end for them either. And then to be able to support and maintain different code bases 50 times or more is also a real challenge. And we're working with agencies where we have a the person responsible for their website has 98% of their job duties, are in a program policy area or is an administrative assistant. And so web stuff is not their core experience. And so we need to make sure that the the tools and the process are easy for them to use, as well as to have some guardrails so that it's easy for them to maintain the, the content over the life of, of the information.

Matt Kleve: So and you also talked about the, the Department of Revenue, the Department of Roads, I don't know, I'm making things up now.

Greg Dunlap: Transportation.

Matt Kleve: Transportation. There we go. They're all going to have a consistent look and feel. And and so the the users of the site will know it's a State of Iowa website. They, you know, have confidence interacting with it and getting their information from it. You know whatever.iowa.gov, right?

Dawn Connet: Absolutely. And and we want to make sure that the that we have a single source of truth. You know, part of having to maintain a website today, because on a large site, you may want to promote some information about, I'm going to use an example of, of getting rent assistance or heat assistance, and you're going to want to promote that on the home page for the agency. But then internal to the website, you're going to have that same content again. And it may be that a link or a deadline or some other information has to change. And now you've got two places to have to change it. So one of the things that we're doing with this project is we're moving more to a structured content experience, so that we do have that single source of truth. And so when you make one change that it's taken care of and you don't have different information in different places. On the website we had, we have had, as my understanding, instances where the state may have been sued over the fact that information was not accurate on the website, that it had not been updated or that it was inconsistent. And so there's, you know, strong legal, compelling reasons to make sure that we're using structured content and it's easy to maintain, but it's also just the right thing to do to make it easier for our content managers and to make it easier for our constituents to get accurate information.

Matt Kleve: And you had mentioned kind of implied that you're also doing some very serious stuff if you're talking about unemployment or rent assistance or heat assistance like this. This is life for constituents, right? And you want to do the best you can for them.

Dawn Connet: Absolutely, absolutely. We and the content managers, they want to do the right thing and we just want to help them out.

Greg Dunlap: When we were working on the State of Georgia project one of the things that we did was we interviewed, you know, citizens of Georgia that we got put in touch with. And and one of them, we asked, you know, what is the implications on your life if you can't access Georgia government services in a timely and effective manner? And she said, I don't eat. And, you know, I've never really forgotten that because at the end of the day, we are we are trying to do this for, you know, the most vulnerable and in need citizens of the state governments that we work with. And I think it's really important to keep that at the top of our mind.

Matt Kleve: So all of the websites of the state of Iowa are very different, and they serve different populations, and they they do different things. Their content is very different. How do we condense all of our content down to be the same website, repeated over and over and over again. How is that possible?

Dawn Connet: Well as for as...

Greg Dunlap: As very painfully.

Dawn Connet: Well. And let me say it, it it it takes a lot of work and it is a, a lift for the agencies and those content managers. But that Lullabot has done a great job analyzing the information, providing good guidance. You know, somebody wants to find the August of 20-2023 agenda or the minutes about a change in some licensing issue. They were talking to somebody at the, you know, the PTA meeting, and they heard that there's a change and that they found it on the XYZ website when they go to look for it. If the agency has ten years of meeting minutes out there and they search for August, they might not, they have to dig through a lot of stuff to find the right one, right? And we just want to fix that. So the the content managers are unpublishing content. But that process has been aided by the strategy work that Lullabot has done to analyze the data and make some recommendations and help and, and help our content managers through some of that change management of having to let it go and and or decide we need to retain that information, it's a public record, we have to keep it and it should always be available. But we don't have to have everything on the website, just the things that people really need.

Matt Kleve: Greg, how do you go about making that decision? How does that work?

Greg Dunlap: I mean, the place where we start is we look at the the things that people publish. Right. And, and we tend to look at it in a very kind of broad conceptual level. In engineering, I think people are, are probably a lot of listeners are familiar with the concept of domain modelling, and that's what we do as well. We look at the types of things that are in the domain and how we can encapsulate them. And sometimes that's very easy, like events, locations, people, you know, things like that are pretty simple to identify. But in a lot of cases it's much more difficult, especially when you're looking at a broad range of content like this. And so what we did is we kind of leveraged something that we started to do on the Georgia site, which is which is, you know, the heart of a lot of this is still textual, informational subject matter. And what we did was we we kind of dressed it up with a lot of metadata so that we could categorize it and make it more machine readable and SEO friendly. And then we also provided structured components that can be used to kind of put it together so somebody could add an accordion, or they could add a promo or a contact, like these little pieces of information that can be used to build customized information that's still structured, but also it contains, you know, a lot of, you know, basically just formatted text and maybe images occasionally. And because we know this stuff isn't there's we're never going to be able to successfully structure all of the information across all of these agencies in a way that makes sense. All we could do is provide the tools that they can do it themselves. And we kind of used what we did for Georgia as a base and have now built on and expanded the work that we did there for the state of Iowa.

Matt Kleve: I want to hear more about the the domain modelling as far as like condensing down all of these ideas and different websites and content into things that are reusable. How does that work? I mean, it is HTML at the end of the day, but having content that's usable in lots of different forms is important too, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. And it's interesting because it's a real balance, because, you know, one of the things that we've discovered is that when especially when we're working with government and higher ed, a lot of the people who are working with these systems are not like professional web or content people. And so we can't introduce a ton of extra complexity into these systems because they find it much more difficult to use. And the acceptance of those content authors of the system is critical to their actual use in on a day to day basis. But at the same time, we have, you know, a level of standards that we have to hit for the website in terms of findability and consistency and reusability and that sort of thing that requires some level of structure. And the balance is, is very, very difficult. I'm not going to lie. And it's a it's a process of experimentation to some point. But the basic concept is that you know, we have to put together, we have to identify shareable pieces. One of the things like, for instance, is that we came up with a content type that's called Contact. And it's very, very flexible because we needed it to we needed to identify different ways that could be that people could have contact information for different contexts. So, for instance, the contact may be a person with an email address, or the contact may be a role with an email address.

Greg Dunlap: So for instance you may want your contact to be, you know, the chief information officer, but you don't want to tie it to a name because that role turns over periodically, right? You the contact may be a phone number. Here is our customer support line. The contact may be a location that you go to or a website. And so we had to create something that could be used in a variety of contexts that was still structured, but also still also still flexible enough to meet the use cases that were going to be needed in a very wide variety of situations. And that opens us up to some things, like somebody could create a contact that is a email address and a phone number and a website and three addresses. And then, you know, that's kind of a mess on their website. And, you know, that's one of those things where we have to work with our design team and say, we have do we want to design around this possibility? Do we just kind of consider it an edge case and worry about it when it comes up later, those sorts of things? And it's a good example of how we have to build constraints plus flexibility into the system and then and then weigh everything against each other in terms of which in terms of which one wins out in any given situation.

Dawn Connet: And that's really important. And we appreciate that Lullabot has thought about the constraints and and the benefits and, and figuring out, you know, and advising us we get to make the decisions, but advising us what is best practice and and what the risks or the pros and cons are. And so the platform is being built so that it meets the majority of the needs and and again then we have that change management of helping people let go of a unique way that they did something in the past that in the end, made it more complicated and hard to support and maintain and then provided a different constituent experience. So you know, just the simple things like a phone number, it that, that support phone number might be listed on 10 pages or 20 pages in, in a 500 page website. And when there's a a change and you've got to go in and find them all and you miss one, it's just it's time consuming. So it makes it so much easier to have that structured content and then, you know, Lullabot has even thought through on the the title of each page. And we've made certain that, you know, the title is 75 characters. And when things are shorter, then you're forced to use simpler language. We're making a major effort as well to improve the readability of the information, because we tend to like to use government speak.

Dawn Connet: And if you only let me describe on a promotion the information about getting rent assistance, I'm going to use simpler, smaller, fewer words. And then that means it's easier to translate into another language, it's more understandable for everybody. And and even on the page title, I'm in a hurry. I need to get this information up. We had a question and answer that came in a question that came in from the public. We need to make everybody aware of what's going on, and we're going to add it to our site. So I'm going to cut and paste in the constituent's question, which was written as about three sentences. And it's and then it's not understandable. And it and it adds more information and context, right? That then maybe narrows it down. And I'm not sure if it really applies to me, because the question is really simple and we can make it shorter when we have we're forced to think through that when we have a constrained data element field length that we have to address. And those are the kinds of things that when we worked with systems in the past, we never really thought about. And we really appreciate that Lullabot is making us think about those things and helping us put in place those guardrails.

Matt Kleve: Greg, you had mentioned that the users of the site, as far as the administrators go, the people who are pushing the content, they're not necessarily web people sometimes. And we're finding that balance of the ease of use versus the clarity of what we're actually doing. In that same breath, you know, I've been in many conversations with, you're going to put people in front of Drupal? Like, that's hard because Drupal is sometimes not the most user friendly thing. How do we find that balance? Like what's what's the path to success there?

Greg Dunlap: I mean, at the end of the day, if a system is hard to use, people won't use it. And I don't really understand the point of building a content management system that people don't use, you know. And so I and it's one of the reasons why I've put a lot more focus on authoring experience in the last several years. So you know, I do put those people in front of Drupal. And there have been lots of times when we've had discussions on this project about how doing something that is better for the user, that can make their lives easier is more of a technical lift, but it's worth doing. I can think of I can think of lots of examples on this project, like one where we had recently was where you had like sort of a list of micro-content pieces that were stacked that people could, you know, rearrange or edit or remove. And we had missed putting the edit button on, on them. And so if they wanted to change that piece of micro content, they had to go all the way back out to the admin content screen, find it, edit it, and then come all the way back and and continue on their piece. Or they could remove it and add a new one that was basically the same, but slightly edited from the other one. And I was like, this is insane.

Greg Dunlap: You know, we should really take the time to fix this. And there and there's lots of things like that where it's like it's just a matter of prioritizing it. And it's hard because oftentimes those content managers are the people who are most left out of the conversations when these projects are put together. And it's one of the reasons why I've always tried to be active when we're doing discovery to bring their voices into the conversation, because, again, like, if they don't accept the system, the system is not going to get used. Content's not going to get updated. They're going to dread it every time they open it up, and they're just going to try and get in and get out as quickly as possible. And that is not in the best interest of the content that we're trying to put out and and communicate with people with. So but, you know, again, at the same time, we've got stuff to get out the door, too. So it's one of those things, you know, every time we have a sprint, we talk through what our focus is going to be. We talk through what our priorities are for that week and what the schedule looks like. And we, you know, and and we balance everything together. And it's hard work. But it's really important.

Matt Kleve: When I think about structured content and these reusable pieces of data that get, you know, built together in lots of different ways, I think about the NPR COPE system that was talked about in great length several years ago, where it's the create once publish everywhere. Am I doing that acronym right?

Greg Dunlap: Yep.

Matt Kleve: Where you might fill out a node form on a Drupal website that has lots of different fields, and what are those fields doing? You have no idea, because that data gets assembled in many different ways, in many different forms and different services. And, you know, it might be published on a website, it might end up on a refrigerator. And that's that's the point of this, you know, wibbly wobbly content structure. It might get used in the way you think it will or not. And that's kind of a challenge sometimes for a web administrator. I know it was for me when Lullabot.com was that way at some point. You know, a few years ago where it was like, oh, there's three different body fields. What do they all do? I don't know which one is the important one. It's it's it's another challenge to to condense down that those administrative screens so that your content's still reusable and the users can still use it. Right. That's that's what I'm getting to. That's the long way around, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. I mean, I'll say in this system that we are primarily building a web platform, and so we haven't really been thinking about the outside contacts, like, you know, oh, this could end up being searched by voice app, or this could end up being used on a kiosk in the office lobby of a agency, which we potentially could at some point and with some of this stuff, like, you know, events, for instance, you could have a list of all the events in your building and we could probably make that work, but it's not something we're thinking about right now. We're really focused on the web experience, which does help us simplify it to some extent. But there is other stuff, like, for instance, one of the things that's really important from a not necessarily SEO standpoint, but are things like meta descriptions and titles, because when you search and you come to Google, if you don't have a well-written meta description or a title that's getting truncated, users don't know what they're going to get when they click on a page. And then and as a result, they may not click on that page. And so while it's not SEO, because your site, your your result is showing high up in Google, it does impact the clickability of the of the page because people don't understand what it's about.

Greg Dunlap: And explaining those kinds of things, and that is the kind of thing where it's like we're not publishing to an external system, but external systems are using this data. It's the same thing, like if you try to share to Facebook or Twitter and they put those cards together, those previews. Right? And getting authors to think even in that context is really difficult. And it's something that we struggle with a lot, especially when we're working with, again, like people who are not web people by trade. Right. And and, you know, it's one of the reasons why I've kind of been advocating to a lot of our clients that have that kind of content management you know, personnel that, you know, investing in, in people who understand the web and understand content and how it's put together is really valuable. Which is not to say those people would replace the subject matter experts who know their domains very well and are invaluable to the process. But you need both pieces.

Matt Kleve: Very good.

Dawn Connet: And I'm sure that that's a challenge for every industry, not just for government. But in government, we do love our government speak, and we do like lots of words. And so when we write, you know, administrative rules, that we're doing it the right way for the legislative body or for attorneys. But we also need to make that same information understandable for the general public. And so building content types that allow us to do both. Right? We can we can be very lengthy and but we also need to be able to be very short and direct. And so it's great to be able to have a, a large document maybe that the large page or maybe use accordions for a large content, and then the promotion for the for the simple direct information.

Matt Kleve: When trying to write content for your residents. Is there a way you try to, you know, scale that down or measure that, like to to know that you're doing a good job of doing that or?

Dawn Connet: So we're our goal is that the top ten most visited pages for each agency would be written at an eighth grade level or below. And and that's hard. Again, we're having to rethink the way we use words and what we have done on a day in and day out basis to make things long and clear. And there's lots of conditions. If you're eligible for stamp benefits, it's it could be A or B or C or D or E or F or G, But most of the people are going to fall in A or B, so let's just make it simple and we'll answer the basic question. And and then there's a link to and if you need all the more information you can see that.

Matt Kleve: And the bills that go through your legislature aren't written that way. So sometimes that can be difficult. Yeah, that makes total sense. We're talking with Dawn Connet from the state of Iowa and Greg Dunlap, Lullabot's director of strategy on the Lullabot podcast. Structured content; learning about how Iowa.Gov is doing it. More, right after this.

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Matt Kleve: Welcome back to the Lullabot podcast. We're talking Iowa.Gov and structured content. And with the e-Government Services Coordinator and Project Manager with the Office of the Chief Information Officer of the state, Iowa, State of Iowa, Dawn Connet. Hi Dawn. So I have a question for you. I went and looked up a big word. There's there's the word. The demonym. Do you know what demonym is? It's.

Dawn Connet: No.

Matt Kleve: It's a word that refers to residents or inhabitants of an area. Right?

Dawn Connet: Ah. Ok.

Matt Kleve: If you're in Iowa, what is a person from Iowa called?

Dawn Connet: An Iowan?

Matt Kleve: Okay. Just checking. I like Iowegian, but that's just me.

Dawn Connet: Right. [Laughing] Well, we have a great store here, Raygun. You have come to visit Des Moines. You've got to go to Raygun, okay? Because they they probably have a shirt that says Iowegian on them. They have a lot of fun Midwest humor.

Matt Kleve: I'm out in the eastern plains of Colorado, and Iowa is just a hop across Nebraska, and I have plenty of family in Nebraska that that talks about the Iowegian's. Usually it's in the context of like a football game between Iowa and Nebraska. But.

Dawn Connet: Yeah. [Laughing]

Matt Kleve: The Iowegian's. And so I googled it and I was like, well, what is an Iowegian? And there was a newspaper in southern Iowa called the Daily Iowegian that published...

Dawn Connet: Really? That I did not know.

Matt Kleve: From 1883. And they finally shut down in May of 2020. So.

Dawn Connet: Wow. Okay.

Matt Kleve: Iowegian was something that was official for a while, for at least a small part of the state. But I'll go with Iowan, I guess.

Dawn Connet: Okay. It's short. It's more plain language.

Matt Kleve: That's. You're right. Hey, consistency. That's good. So I'm sure that when you brought sites into the platform, or at least warned them they were coming into the platform and they came from lots of different places. Not all Drupal. Some were Drupal, right? There are others that are coming. There are site managers or owners of those, those organizations that are like, but I'm going to lose this one widget that's on my website or this piece of functionality that I really like. How am I going to be able to do that in the new platform? How do you have to have those discussions?

Dawn Connet: And one of the things that's been helpful about the project is we have really good executive sponsorship. So this came from the governor's office. The governor's office has a staff person assigned to the project, and if the conversations need to happen at a director level, they can happen at a director level. Websites we all take ownership in and pride in our, in being an Iowan. Right in Iowegian or and we take pride in in the website that we built and so it's hard to to give some of those things up. But having that executive sponsorship is able to, to help an agency say, you know, and this is a little bit different, but you're accordion, the experience for an Iowan on the way you, you decided to have an accordion is completely different than agency Y and agency Z. And and that's just not helpful. And when we focus on and and like I said, people really staff want to serve our constituents. We want to be helpful. That's why we probably work in government. It's because we want to make life better for Iowans. And so when you understand that giving up that widget really does, in the end, help make it better for Iowans, it's it's a little bit easier to make that change. And, you know, but sometimes it's hard because agencies have picked colors, right. They have maybe built a function on their site that they thought was really great, and it was somebody's, you know, somebody's brainchild. And and they worked hard on it. And, and now we have to walk away from it. And so we just have to remember that we're serving Iowans better. And and then hopefully making it easier for us and that it's a change that we just have to work through.

Greg Dunlap: And sometimes it's like it, you know, it goes the other way too, like, like we, you know, a lot of the agencies have, you know, large tables of documents. And we created a functionality for Georgia that we've transferred here called Listing Pages, which is basically like views in a field, really is what it comes down, or views in a content type, which is really what it comes down to where you choose a content type. And there's some criteria about how you list things about like, I want to I want to sort it this way, and I want these filters to be available and stuff like that, or I want it to limit it by this taxonomy term or whatever. And you go. And so one of the things we've been talking about is how we can leverage listings of documents to meet a lot of the needs that these agencies have, that they're doing broadly different things with. And, and, you know, sometimes some functionality comes back from that. Like we noticed that a lot of agencies rely heavily on document IDs, right. Like, you know this is document DLP456 or something like that. Right. And we didn't have really a way to show that or add it in our documents. But you know, this is something that we saw that was broadly useful across a lot of agencies. And so we did it. And and that's the kind of thing where we can, you know, we we can we can build things that are generic but also meet the needs of agencies. And we're not against it. The I think the thing that's big for us is like, how can we take things that agencies are doing in a very specific way and make it more broadly applicable so that it's useful for all agencies? And that's, that's the that's where the conversation happens. And sometimes we add some stuff and sometimes people have to give stuff up.

Matt Kleve: Let's talk a little bit about listing pages, if you don't mind Greg.

Greg Dunlap: Yeah, sure.

Matt Kleve: I, I think that's a really powerful part of the whole platform that's being built. So there's, there's normal content types, right? There's basic pages and there's media that are documents. And we've talked about events, and I'm going to probably forget most of the other general content types. And then there are micro content, including promos and smaller bits of content that are assembled and used in places on the website, but don't necessarily have a URL of their own. Right. That's what we call micro content. But listing pages are able to make lists of this content as a node. So a listing page is a node, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yep!

Matt Kleve: That has a bunch of rules and essentially is like miniature views to create content that is used, assembled I guess...

Greg Dunlap: Yeah.

Matt Kleve: For for its own specific use. So if I need a list of documents with this taxonomy term that can be done with a listing page and not with views. And that's really where a lot of the power comes from, because all of these sites are not only sharing a code base, but they're sharing configuration. And that's cool that you can do that with content, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. I mean, we needed a way, you know, when you're building a platform like this that's very broadly useful, you need a way to build custom listings because everybody has their own needs. Right? And like, for instance, we have a lot of taxonomies that are available to every agency. But the terms come in empty. They can fill in the terms with whatever they need for their own purposes. So for instance, you know, events have an event type and some agencies are going to have board meetings and some agencies are going to have webinars, you know, and but they can add and manage those terms as they wish and then use those terms to build listing pages. And and the listing pages are really just config in a node is really what it comes down to. It's like a way to config something fairly simply and save it in a content type, because that's the interface that users are most used to doing. And there's some other stuff like you also add like a title in the description and that sort of thing as well. But but yeah, it's a way to bring the power of very basic views to the users. And it's really it's really essential. It is really an essential piece of building sites that are maintainable by people, because a lot of these sites are coming over and they have just built manual tables of all of this stuff. Right? And like if a document is used in five places, they've got to update it everywhere. And and it's a real pain you know. And so building this stuff that can manage that automatically, it's one of the ways that we can leverage like yes, we understand that setting this up might be slightly more painful than you're used to, but look at all of these benefits that you're getting out of it, because I think I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Dawn, but in a lot of cases, these agencies would have had to go to their agency partner...

Dawn Connet: Right.

Greg Dunlap: Or their vendor...

Dawn Connet: Right.

Greg Dunlap: ... In order to get a view made, for instance. And now they can do it themselves and manage it themselves.

Dawn Connet: Right. And, and also the concept that we have of a landing page using micro content, being able to place the content onto the landing page, and to be able to use that not just as the homepage, but for internal pages, allows the agencies to refresh the look of their site, rather than having to go back and go through a design effort and build something from scratch. So agencies do get a lot of flexibility. You know, they'd like to be able to have things be more visually appealing. And, and I think we're delivering that with this platform. The you know, the other challenge that we've had is that in the past, there are agencies that maybe have more resources, they have more budget, or they have a more web content staff that are for a larger agency. And so they maybe made investments to get features, functions, maybe, you know, they were able to build lists on their site, but other agencies couldn't do it. They didn't have the resources. You know, whether it's to write a check, to pay somebody to do it or the staff time to be able to to do it. And now we're we're making an investment that benefits everybody. So everybody gets all of these really great extra features.

Greg Dunlap: I'll say that listing pages as they were written on for Georgia were very heavily customized to that site, but we've been doing some work on Iowa to make it more broadly usable. And one of our developers, Christian Espinosa Espínola. I hope I didn't butcher his name too bad. Has had some ideas about how we can make this a little more broadly usable and release it as a module in the future for use by the general public, which I think would be a really, really cool Drupal module to release. And I hope that we can make that happen.

Dawn Connet: Oh, that's very exciting.

Matt Kleve: The exciting part is, is that Drupal is using it. That helps Iowa too, right?

Greg Dunlap: Yeah. That's right because.

Dawn Connet: That's right! More support!

Matt Kleve: Because they might find some corner case that we didn't run into or...

Dawn Connet: That's right.

Matt Kleve: ... We wouldn't run into until the 47th site is rolled onto the platform and they try something that nobody's tried before and. Yeah, but it's good.

Dawn Connet: So we can name the model something like Iowegian lists.

Matt Kleve: [Laughing] I don't know.

Greg Dunlap: Perfect!

Matt Kleve: We'd have to figure that out.

Matt Kleve: Great.

Greg Dunlap: Maybe that's what we should have named the site theme Iowegian. I can't even remember what it ended up being.

Matt Kleve: Wild rose.

Greg Dunlap: Ah okay, yeah.

Dawn Connet: Yes.

Matt Kleve: I think we we used some flowers, and the color schemes are are named really great, too. I think Jared Ponchot had some fun with regions in Iowa and specific things. And I think, like, there's a gray color that's named after a county in Iowa that has some coal production.

Dawn Connet: Yeah, yeah. All right. I believe that's I believe, yes. And and and the wild rose is, in fact, the official flower of the state of Iowa, so.

Greg Dunlap: Hmm okay.

Matt Kleve: [Laughing] Very good.

Dawn Connet: Just in case you run across that on a trivia contest sometime.

Matt Kleve: Dawn, what got Iowa into this idea of standardizing everything and moving to structured content, or how did that end up happening?

Dawn Connet: Well. I think some of it was the you know, the support from the governor's office that we have a consistent look and feel and experience, but we have for many years had a content management workgroup we had a web standards group that looked at trying to build some consistency. What, give agencies flexibility, which we still want to do. Not every site is going to be identical. We want to give agencies flexibility. But for many years we've had standards where things had to exist or had to be located in a specific place on the site. So that About is a is a section of a website that has to exist. You know that we want to have search available. And as websites evolved over a couple of decades, some of those things didn't exist. And then they got rolled in and the experience became better for for Iowans with that consistency. So even though most recently we've had this support from the governor's office for a the project and for a more consistent experience, a lot of the agencies have been involved in trying to come up with the things that that need to be consistent across all sites.

Matt Kleve: How long have you worked with State of Iowa?

Dawn Connet: So I've been with the state of Iowa for, I think, about 15 years. And I've been at OCIO. Amazingly, ten years and always working in the, the platforms across the enterprise that engage citizens or provide transparency. So we also work in things like online payment or online forms. And as we are building our platform now, our new digital experience platform, as we refer to it, we're really evaluating what functions and the architecture that needs to be in place, not just for the website and the content types, but to think about what forms should be available and where they should live and to think of as we build into the future, how if someone we don't want there to be a wrong door for a constituent, if you come in on the civil rights page, but you have a question for human rights, we want to be able to to get the person to the right place. And so we're thinking strategically about how we can improve that experience. Today we have a directory that is .Net application that has about 5-600 different services. And for an enterprise organization with a lot of divisions, you know, the enterprise of the state and agencies, again, we want the agencies to have the control and flexibility that they need. We want them to be able to be the ones entering and authoring the information to put in those services, or to do updates to their directory information. But sometimes they don't have the time or, you know, to get it done. And so we also need the ability to have that information be able to be centrally maintained so that we can also contribute to it. So we're exploring different ways and how we can do that.

Matt Kleve: Well with structured content. Sometimes you can end up reusing content inside of a website, but perhaps exporting it into something central like that. Is that something we're kind of looking at.

Dawn Connet: Yes. It's absolutely something that that we're exploring. We want to get through a few more of these website migrations first. You know, the the the list is never short.

Matt Kleve: How is a migration happening?

Dawn Connet: So a lot of the sites that we're working with, I mean, I think in, in life there's an 80 over 20 rule. So 80% of the sites are smaller and they maybe have a 100 pages, or maybe they had 200 pages of content, and they took a look at it and said, oh, you know what? There's content that's stale or older. We haven't really done a good job with cleanup, and one of the nice things we have on our content types now is that we can put an archive date on, on content events roll off automatically. They and the event type that Lullabot is working on is going to allow for a little bit different view if you're registering for a webinar. But the webinar has already happened that it won't necessarily appear in the same way that it did before the webinar. So Lullabot has helped us, you know, think about how to make it easier for the content managers and, and lower the maintenance on it. But with the with the services, we are wanting to be able to maintain them with the agency as well as across at an enterprise level.

Matt Kleve: Very cool.

Dawn Connet: That was some rambling. [Laughing]

Matt Kleve: I also kind of tongue in cheek, asked the question because I'm the guy that's running the migrate commands, so.

Dawn Connet: Okay. Right.

Dawn Connet: So so. Yes. So so that so the answer to the question was in an 80/20 world, where 80% of the of the sites are smaller, we want them to manually migrate. We want folks to take those hundred pages and load them into the system so they become familiar with it. And I think that you get a better experience. I talked to a couple of the agencies today. You know, when they first start working in the new platform, they're they're nervous and they're anxious, but once they get to using it, they're off like rockets. And very comfortable. And if we simply turned, if we did an auto migration of everything and then had them go peck around and make sure that it looked right, they wouldn't be comfortable with, oh, I'm going to go create a promotion. Oh, I'm going to go create a statistic. We want. And the other thing too I think is just the overall effort around migration for the large sites that that 20% we're doing auto migration, but we still really want agencies to get there, get into the system and work with it.

Matt Kleve: I think it's also really good that they get the opportunity to look at their content, because I know that when I've been in organizations before I worked at Lullabot, it was, oh yeah, that's that dark corner of the website that hasn't been looked at in six years, and it's probably a good idea to actually take a look at it, as opposed to clicking a button and bringing the dark corner to the new shiny website. Right?

Dawn Connet: Absolutely. And and if they are copying and pasting from the old page to the new page, they, they, they maybe get a sense for, oh, this one is really long. There's a lot here. Maybe I maybe I should look at it. Oh if I look at it. Oh my, I we should rewrite this or rearrange it.

Matt Kleve: So there's there's some manual effort involved, but also some Drupal migrate stuff to, to bring bulk parts along the way.

Dawn Connet: Yes and, and we've supported the content managers through that rewriting of their content by working with an outside organization to rewrite the content and give it to the agency, to let them review and evaluate it, and help give people an example of how they can take a long paragraph of text and break it up into bullet points, which makes it more readable. So we're we're trying to help support the agencies through that.

Matt Kleve: So I looked at my calendar, and I'm actually supposed to talk to one of those agencies about their new sites, one of those early kickoff calls coming up really soon. So my next couple of questions are, Greg, do you have anything else you want to add as we point toward wrapping this up?

Greg Dunlap: No, I don't think so. It's been a really challenging and exhilarating project, and I'm really glad that we're able to be of service to the citizens of Iowa. And I look forward to seeing what we can get done in the future.

Matt Kleve: Dawn, this is an exciting time.

Dawn Connet: Absolutely. And I just can't thank you, Matt and Greg and the other Lullabot folks for all of the great work, because you are making life easier for our content managers and improving the experience for Iowans. So thank you.

Matt Kleve: I look forward, and just so we're clear as we talk today, there are two websites, right, that are live and public facing right now. And there are more on the cusp. Right? Like next week...

Dawn Connet: Right. So right, by the time you publish this, right, there's going to be four sites. Or if you if you don't do it for ten days, there will be 6 or 7.

Matt Kleve: Yeah. And I remember there was a conversation I had with a project manager this week who was like, oh, this other one. Yeah, that's like the beginning of May. And was like, oh well, shoot, we better get that done soon too. So yeah, it's happening fast.

Dawn Connet: Buckle up.

[Laughing]

Matt Kleve: Thanks. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate the time.

Greg Dunlap: Thank you Matt.

Matt Kleve: Yep. Bye.

Dawn Connet: Thanks. Bye.

Matt Kleve: Hey everybody, just a quick editor's note. Yeah. Now it's July, and I did that recording much earlier, late spring. It sat on the desktop and I didn't get it edited. And I appreciate Dawn and Greg for coming on the podcast. And the project continues and more sites are being launched and things are going well.

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