US Forest Service

Project Objectives

The 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act, otherwise known as 21st Century IDEA, was signed into law in December 2018. The Act aims to improve the digital experience for government customers and reinforces existing requirements for federal public websites. Per the 21st Century IDEA, public-facing websites and digital services should use the U.S. Web Design System and meet eight specific requirements, one of them being “Searchable - contain a search function”.

For a few years now, WWW Portal has not had any search function available on their public-facing websites. WWW Portal is also undergoing web modernization and the current plan is to transition all of WWW Portal over to Drupal in late 2023. With this in mind, the project to implement search within WWW Portal must weigh time investment for development versus lifespan of the feature, as well as whether there are any opportunities to reuse components of the search solution in Drupal.

The public should have the ability to search for recreation sites within a unit

The public should have the ability to search with the unit’s site content (HTML)

Search Results should be:

Sorted by most recently updated

Sorted such that hits that match the ‘page name’ or ‘header’ show up first

Prioritized by Overview pages first, then non-classified after that (e.g., searching ‘Permit’ takes you to “Passes & Permits” page first rather than the most recent rech-site updated with the word ‘permit’)

Limited to only published items (do not want unpublished)

Restricted to the unit

Users should be able to filter search results by:

Node (e.g., recreation, jobs, learning)