We post roadmap updates about twice a month. These posts show what the GOV.UK team has recently changed and what we’re working on next.
Once per month, these posts also include an updated product roadmap which gives a longer-term view of the changes we’re planning.
The November issue of the roadmap is out now: download it here.
Priorities
We’re currently prioritising changes to GOV.UK which:
- enable us to complete the transition of HMRC, agencies and non-departmental public bodies into GOV.UK by Christmas
- reduce the complexity of our software, so development of GOV.UK does not slow down
- meet mainstream users’ needs to check their eligibility under new or changed government schemes
- ready GOV.UK to meet users’ needs around the 2015 election
Things we’ve done since 20 October
For end users
In the past couple of weeks, we’ve:
- completed transition of more agencies including Homes and Communities Agency and Innovate UK leaving 33 agencies to go, and continued to transition HMRC (tax content on GOV.UK now gets more traffic than the content still to come across from hmrc.gov.uk)
- built a tool which lets users find the right Valuation Office Agency contact for their property based on postcode (this will go live when VOA completes transition)
- made further progress on adding email notifications to sub-topics and to the 2 finders for drug and medical device safety information (these finders won’t launch until MHRA completes transition)
- completed the build of finders for marine and rail accident investigation reports, including improvements to the finder publishing tools (these won’t launch until MAIB and RAIB complete transition)
For government publishers
For our users around government, we’ve:
- launched new ‘info’ pages, revealing user needs and usage data to help content designers measure performance and improve their content
- enabled translation of content in Whitehall publisher into Estonian
- made several small improvements to the user experience of the Whitehall publisher, including publications on other websites being modelled as external attachments so you can control the display order, and allowing the tagging of statistics announcements to multiple topics
- retired the manual curation step in the process of sending email alerts about content relevant to local government (we’ll blog more about this soon)
- continued to improve the new guidance manuals for publishers
- improved the controls for managing editors to toggle between the two organisation page layouts, for either news priority or services priority.
Technical and process improvements
In the past few weeks we’ve:
- completed the work of creating a new syntax to make it easier for developers and (some) content designers to reason about the logic contained within smart answers like this one, and built 1 new and converted 1 existing smart answer to use this syntax
- solved the problem of URL arbitration (stopping applications from trying to use the same URL for different pages) as part of re-architecting our software to use a single publishing pipeline
- completed switchover of the transition tool to Postgres, to allow it to scale and remain stable
- retired two applications (‘redirector’ and ‘fact cave’) which were no longer needed
- completed technical work to serve GOV.UK from behind a second content delivery network, increasing our resilience
Things we plan to do next
For end users
In the next couple of weeks, we plan to:
- continue to transition more agencies onto GOV.UK, including HM Courts and Tribunals Service and the Valuation Office Agency
- release a new tool for calculating parental leave entitlement incorporating new Shared Parental Leave rules
- complete the work of adding email notifications to sub-topic pages and to the finders for drug safety updates and alerts and recalls for drugs and medical devices
- release a new tool to help users find embassies and consular offices (still pending FCO content changes)
- start a project to prototype possible changes to the policies format so we can meet users’ needs for understanding government policy after the election, and to define the approach we will take to handling deprecated content
- make the layout of services and information links on organisation pages clearer and more consistent, to help users understand their purpose more easily
For government publishers
We will:
- provide a way for publishers to export lists of documents in a CSV format, to make it easier for them to audit their content
- make progress on scraping and importing content into the various new finders for transitioning agencies
- keep supporting HMRC to hook up their manuals publishing tool to publish redacted manuals onto GOV.UK through our API
Technical and process improvements
On the tech side, we will:
- start a project to rebuild the Whitehall application using our new publishing APIs, so we can continue to iterate the /government part of the site and the publishing tools to manage it
- continue with the related project of building a single publishing pipeline, with a focus on tagging content to topics and the ability to flexibly tag related items of any kind to one another
If any of this is unclear, or if you have feedback on whether we’re prioritising the right stuff, please do comment on this post to let us know.
