Overview
transport.nsw.gov.au is the main website for Transport for NSW. I helped maintain it, and in my second stint at the agency we also built a platform that lets teams across Transport for NSW manage the content for their own websites from a single Drupal instance.
The challenge
Teams across the agency need websites for their projects and programs. Building a separate Drupal site for each one means rebuilding the same thing again and again.
My role
- Main site: I maintained a portfolio of high-traffic Drupal 8 sites including transport.nsw.gov.au, and built custom modules for business logic and third-party API integrations.
- Platform: I built custom REST endpoints and GraphQL schemas for the Next.js frontends, and worked with the React team on caching. API response times came down from about 1 second to about 100 ms.
- Upgrades: I was tech lead on the Drupal 9 to 10 upgrade for 15+ sites, finished in about three months with zero downtime.
The solution
We built it headless. Teams manage projects, programs, pages and news in one Drupal instance, and a standard Next.js frontend reads that content over GraphQL. Spinning up a new site means deploying another copy of the frontend.
The impact
The agency maintains one Drupal platform instead of rebuilding a Drupal site every time, and new sites start from the standard frontend. 18 sites run on the platform, and provisioning a new one with the standard style guide takes days where it used to take weeks.
