Glossary

A

Accessibility 

Accessibility requirements are a technical standard which enables a website to be accessed, particularly by users with a disability. GovCMS meets the Australian Government’s web accessibility requirements. These include the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) at level AA.

Agile

Agile is a project methodology for software development.

Ahoy

The command line tool in Lagoon, ‘ahoy’ is used for a range of tasks and as a prefix to some files.

B

Beta domain

A production environment with the prefix '.beta' used to publicly or privately test alternative website content and/or designs in parallel to the live website.

C

Code updates

Code updates are updates to the GovCMS distribution.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is collection of servers, spread out geographically, to speed up the delivery of web content. Content is collected (cached) regularly to multiple servers and locations, so that users can access web pages, images, and video quickly through a server located near them.

Content freeze

A content freeze is a period during the migration process where we ask agencies not to change content on their site, to ensure content is not lost during migration.

D

Domain

A Domain is your website address, which for this site is Content management and web hosting for government. Most Australian Government websites will end with .gov.au.

DNS

The DNS (Domain Name System) is like a telephone directory for web servers.  A DNS record links a websites "Domain" with the address of the web server that hosts that website.

Drupal

Drupal is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that is the core of the GovCMS system.

Drupal open source software

Ability to reuse, change and share software.

DSS

Digital service standard https://www.dta.gov.au/help-and-advice/about-digital-service-standard.

DTA

Digital Transformation Agency https://www.dta.gov.au/.

F

Feature environment

As part of the GovCMS platform, each site can have multiple versions of their website available for testing or development purposes. These are often used as UAT or Test environments for new features being developed, and while they are on the GovCMS platform, they are not discoverable by the public.

Forklift

A forklift is the process of transferring your GovCMS website from one environment to another. This could be from an off-platform environment (for example a service providers servers), or an on-platform environment (for example from a GovCMS Sandbox environment into Production). More information about the Forklift process can be found on the GovCMS Knowledge Base.

G

GitHub

Github is a code repository that provides version control and collaboration between developers.  GovCMS uses Github to publicly provide the GovCMS distribution to anyone.

GitLab

Gitlab is an open source product used for software development.  GovCMS uses Gitlab (Branded as GovCMS Projects) to store projects from which the websites are deployed. 

GovCMS distribution

The GovCMS distribution is a set of Drupal modules, managed and maintained by the Department of Finance. A list of the modules are available at drupal.org or on our website.

H

HTML

HTML is the standard markup language for creating web pages. HTML stands for hypertext markup language.

I

IRAP

The Information Security Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) is an Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) initiative to provide high-quality information and communications technology security assessment services to government.

L

Lagoon

Lagoon is the Drupal hosting platform used by GovCMS.  It is open-source, and works with other products such as Kubernetes and Docker.

Legacy domains

A legacy domain is an additional or old website domain that previously received traffic.

M

Metadata

Metadata is data that describes and gives information about other data.

Migration

Migration is the process of moving your website from a sandbox environment to its production location. More information is available on the support page https://www.govcms.gov.au/support.

P

PaaS

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud licensing and distribution model which includes maintenance and support costs for the infrastructure only. PaaS requires you to manage the application maintenance and support, however, allows you to add a wider set of modules to your website than available in the SaaS distribution. Information about what is included in a PaaS plan and pricing is available on the GovCMS pricing page https://www.govcms.gov.au/pricing.

Patching

A patch is a small update to the GovCMS distribution.

Product owner

A product owner facilitates product decisions and ensures the product creates value for its customers, users and the organisation.

Production environment

The live online environment in which website content is made available to the public.

Pygmy

Pygmy is a command line tool used to start the necessary docker containers for local development on Mac and Linux

R

Redirect service

A URL redirect service sends a user from one URL to an alternative URL.

Routes

A route is the path a data packet travels on from one network to another network based on the destination IP address.

S

SaaS

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a cloud licensing and distribution model which includes maintenance and support costs for both the application and infrastructure. SaaS uses a controlled distribution model to manage the available modules for your website. Information about what is included in a SaaS plan and pricing is available on the GovCMS pricing page https://www.govcms.gov.au/pricing

Sandbox

A sandbox is a secure online environment in which content, theme and code for a website can be developed and tested.

Search engine web crawlers

A search engine web crawler or spider is an internet bot that systematically browses the internet typically for the purpose of web indexing.

Shield

See "Website shield"

Site audit report

A site audit report includes findings after examining the codebase for a website. It often contains recommendations for best practice.

W

Website shield

A website shield blocks the website behind a simple Username and Password popup prompt. This serves to block search engine web crawlers from indexing the website to appear in search results, additionally it allows websites to be launched ahead of time, but still blocked behind a Shield. This allows UAT tasks to be able to be conducted by users with knowledge of the username and password.

In SaaS sites, the shield can only be applied for an entire environment at a time, not specific pages or sections.