Features

Agencies can use govspace to establish their own ‘space’ to host a blog, website, or something which combines features of both – for example, a website with commenting functionality.

Starter Kit

All spaces have access to the govspace Starter Kit that includes Finance-created themes which you can use or modify when customising the appearance of your space. The Starter Kit also includes a set of legal templates, such as copyright and privacy statements.

Themes

The appearance of your space is governed by the WordPress theme on which it is built. All themes included in the Starter Kit offer administration options that allow you to quickly customise the appearance of your space.

Finance also maintains a test environment to allow agencies to experiment with theme development if the agency is not able to support a local copy of WordPress. There is also the option to provide your own theme.

Examples of themes created by Finance include:

Blue Steel

Examples of spaces that use Blue Steel are:

• AGIMO Blog – Effective and efficient use of ICT
• Gov 2.0 Showcase

Natural

Example of a space that uses Natural:

• Innovation Blog – Empowering change in the public sector

Legal templates

Legal statements are an important part of any agency website, as they let users know how that website is run and any terms of use which they need to be aware of. The Starter Kit includes several legal templates which agencies can adopt or modify as they wish.

• Copyright
• Privacy
• Terms of Use

Plugins

Plugins extend the functionality of WordPress in many various ways.  Agencies can only use WordPress plugins on the following list of AGIMO-approved plugins that have been tested for compliance for use on the govspace platform.

• Akismet*  2.5.3 -   identifies and blocks comment and trackback spam on you blog
• After The Deadline*  0.49007 -  checks spelling, style and grammar
• AVH Extended Categories Widgets  3.4.2 -  gives you three widgets for displaying categories
• Broken Link Checker  1.3.1 - checks your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images
• cformsII  12.2 –  allows the creation of powerful online forms with database capturing and exporting into various formats
• CMS Page Order  1.4 -  allows you to rearrange the page order with quick and easy drag and drop
• Comment Form Quicktags  1.3.2 - provides formatting buttons while commenting on an article
• Comment Notifier  2.2.2 - allows one to be alerted via email on new comments on a per article basis
• FD Footnotes  1.21 - makes inserting footnotes easy
• GD Star Rating  1.9.10 -  allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog
• My Calendar  1.8.9 - provides event management and numerous methods to display your event
• Per-Comment Terms and Conditions - 1.4     
• Revisionary  1.1.6 - allows users to submit changes for approval prior to publishing
• Stream Video Player  1.3.0 – allows for multimedia streaming that is highly accessible when given the appropriate caption files and alternate versions
• Subscribe2  6.3 – Provides a comprehensive subscription management and email notification system that sends email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog
• Table of Contents Plus  1109 – allows you to automatically create a context specific index or table of contents for long pages, and output a sitemap
• WordPress.com Custom CSS  1.5 - allows you to tweak the presentation of your selected theme.  “WordPress.com” refers to the theme customisation options provided by the free wordpress.com service
• WordPress Importer*  0.5 -  allows you to import posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories tags and more
• WP-Cumulus  1.23 – allows you to display your site’s tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D.
• WP-PageNavi  2.74 – adds a more advanced paging navigation interface
• WP-Polls  2.62 - allows you to add polls to your space
• WP-reCAPTCHA  1.3 – integrates reCAPTCHA anti-spam methods including comment, registration and email spam protection
• WP-SpamFree  2.1.1.2 – prevents the submission of most spam comments
• WPtouch Pro  2.2.4 – automatically transforms your blog into an iphone application style theme

(* = globally enabled)

Finance re-evaluates the list of plugins every so often for compliance purposes, and may remove plugins if they compromise or potentially compromise the running of the govspace platform. We will notify affected space owners of any changes to plugin availability well in advance.  We may also add to the list of plugins from time to time.

Finance-created Plugins

Comment Truncator

Changes the way that blog comments over a certain length are displayed by showing a shortened version of the comment and replacing the remaining comment text with a link that will show the full comment.  The number of words displayed in the shortened version of the comment and the text of the link used to expand the comment can be modified.  The plugin uses Javascript and defaults back to displaying the entire comment if Javascript is not present.

Per-Comment Terms and Conditions

Adds a mandatory checkbox before a comment is submitted to ensure that a user has acknowledged your terms and conditions.

Choice of govspace domain

The default domain name for all spaces is yourspace.govspace.gov.au. We recommend keeping this as your authoritative domain name but can also accommodate mapped domains such as yourspace.agency.gov.au.

Please note we cannot support sub-folder mappings such as agency.gov.au/yourspace/.

Web Stats

Finance does not limit the use of an agency’s preferred analytics solution.  For those that do not maintain their own, we can provide access to our govspace statistics package – Google Urchin.  Google Urchin is maintained by Finance on its servers and information that is captured by our analytics package does not leave Australia.

Please be aware that we are not able to provide access to raw server logs from the govspace service.