Poland’s Ministry of Economy will release the source code that it wrote for linking its back office to a site built with the Drupal open source content management system (CMS), reports the EU’s public sector open source news site Joinup. The site is used for consultations and tgathering feedback on the Ministry’s projects and policies.
“This is more than a standalone consultation platform based on Drupal”, a Ministry spokesperson explains. The service is made of two parts: firstly, a module for the Drupal-based site to create consultations and share documents and secondly the code that links this module to the document management system. “We’re using Zend Framework to create this second part. The solution allows us to embed the document and work-flow management system, including legislative and technical rules for creating the documents.”
The applications are currently being readied for a production environment. The spokesperson remarked that the developers are still fixing a few bugs, but live data is already being used.
The ministry expects this phase to be completed in about a month, after which the code will be published on a software development site, although the Ministry still has to decide which code repository to use.
Poland’s Foundation on Open and Free Software (FWIOO) says that the Ministry’s site “has the potential to become the default on-line consultation platform of the Polish government.” FWIOO was also involved in drafting the software’s specifications. “One year ago we created a similar tool for the Ministry of Administration and Digitization. That was also a combination of Drupal and free software extensions”.