Institutional Drupal platforms
Drupal development at FORNET on institutional websites — multilingual content, editorial workflows, accessibility and long-term maintenance for public-sector and international clients.
- Multilingual editorial platforms
- Role-based editorial workflows
- Accessibility and performance work
- Long-term maintenance cycles
Context
I work as a Drupal developer at FORNET, a web agency in Rabat whose client base is largely public institutions and international organisations. Most of my day-to-day experience with institutional websites comes from this work.
Client engagements are covered by agency agreements, so this page describes the kind of work and the problems it involves rather than naming individual projects. If you're evaluating me for a specific project, ask and I'll tell you what I can about relevant experience.
What institutional sites actually demand
They differ from commercial sites in ways that shape every technical decision.
Several languages, properly. Not a translation widget — genuine content, interface and configuration translation, with an editorial process behind it. In Morocco that usually means Arabic, French and English, which also means getting right-to-left layout right rather than treating it as an afterthought.
Editorial teams, not developers. The people publishing are communications staff. The content model has to be obvious, the workflow has to match how the organisation actually approves things, and permissions have to reflect a real hierarchy.
Accessibility as a requirement. Public-sector sites are held to standards that are audited. That's a constraint on markup and interaction design from the start, not something retrofitted before launch.
A long life. These sites run for years with modest budgets. That argues for core and well-maintained contributed modules over clever custom code, and for writing the custom code that is needed to core standards so it survives the next major version.
Where I usually spend the time
- Content modelling — entity types, fields and relationships that hold up as requirements grow
- Editorial workflows, content moderation and role-based permissions
- Multilingual configuration and the translation process around it
- Custom modules for requirements no contributed module covers
- Integration with the organisation's existing systems
- Performance: caching strategy, render caching, database query work
- Version upgrades and the audit work that precedes them