Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Web Platform For a Small Municipality?
First time accepted submitter r3dR0v3r writes "I have the opportunity to help improve / replace the website of my small U.S. town (~6000 people). The town leaders are open to most any suggestions, and are open to the idea of having the website facilitate a more open government — by being a place at which town documents, meeting agendas, meeting minutes, legal forms, ordinances, etc. can be found in an organized way and downloaded. And of course the site should provide general info about the town, it's services, recreation opportunities, etc.. Now, we have no budget, so we'll be looking at free/open software. I've considered options such as Drupal, but I'm doing this as volunteer work so I don't want to start from scratch and spend overly much time. Thus, I'm looking for advice about any existing platforms made specifically for municipalities as a great way to get a jump start. I'm guessing there are other slashdotters that have helped their communities in this way. Your suggestions please?"
LAMP... well acronym for the grammar Nazis
Thats a tough question since whatever you choose, you would want integration with online social communities and a nice comment system. Because of that fact, the choices narrow...
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress are all viable options... just go with whatever you are comfortable with...
Use a CMS like Joomla, Drupal (or any other similar)
Or, if you're a glutton for punishment, Sharepoint. (yes, that is a joke)
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Drupal with CiviCRM. Perfect for what you've described.
Make sure to have a clear support contract, paid or otherwise. This could become an unpaid time sink unless you set clear time and other boundiaries NOW. You may not notice if you do,but you will pay if you don't.
Silence is a state of mime.
Do not listen to this advice. RoR is totally fail. It sucks at performance, scaling and pretty much every other metric that is important.
I mean, 'r3dR0v3r' should know about web platforms.
Ugly, and you could do better.
But why not simply have a publicly viewable share and dump the documents there.
Stuff life Dropbox is easy for non-technical people to use.
Later you could put together a fancier solution. Or just use the current website to point to "active" directories.
IMO "no budget" is dumb
Now that mod_security has added support for Nginx I can see no better option. Fast, flexible and secure. Maybe varnish if you really need it out front, but Nginx can do 90% of that anyway
Starting of with Drupal is probably good. It should more than handle the load on without too much trouble if you need more horsepower. You can pretty easily setup up and configure users to add content and its not exceptionally difficult to code extensions or find a developer to hack something together. I think the fact that power users can make it do 80% of the work means you will save time on all but the most complex stuff.
Drupal is an excellent choice for whipping up a sophisticated website. It has modules for doing all sorts of things from event calendars to forums and whatnot. Also, unlike Wordpress, Drupal does a pretty good job keeping up security. You can put together the basics of a functioning website in a matter of hours.
There are also lots of free themes available, including ones that provide easily extendable frameworks so you can come up with your own theme if you're so inclined.
All that being said, the bulk of the effort will NOT be making the website. The bulk will be in entering the content, and server management/security. For content, your best bet will be to use a wysiwyg editor module that is capable of handling copy-and-pasted word documents. I suggest installing the wysiwyg module, along with CKEditor or TinyMCE. Security is something you'd have to do reading up on, as there are no magic bullets.
Start with something small. Get an old box, slap a Linux distro and LAMP on it. Toss Wordpress on there and start uploading content. Don't take this on as some big project with a lot of things integrated into it. Begin with the bare basics and add features on a as-needed basis. Don't over think the early stages or you'll get bogged down before you even start.
This is where I pitch www.codeforamerica.org and see what it may offer!
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
google docs might take care of some of this
no budget, no money for onsite servers means cloud
even then for such a small environment there is no reason to buy your own hardware and code everything from scratch when someone has probably done all the work for you in a hosted solution
If the base beneath your CMS is not fast and secure your CMS will be compormised. Also check out Magnolia it is a powerful and interesting CMS that is java servlet deployed.
Because 300 connections to the database to display a picture of your cat can't be wrong.
For the type of things you're looking for, I'd recommend LocalWiki. While so far it's been used mostly by communities vs municipalities, it includes robust permissions, is under active development, and is built w/ some nice geo-extensions for where that's applicable. It's very easy to get up and running and you could run a micro EC2 instance to test out for (practically) free.
I'd also suggest that you try to connect w/ others that are doing similar things. There's a large community of civic hackers. For those working directly w/ municipal govt, check out the Code for America Brigade, a community that's all about that and can provide help/support for exactly this sort of thing. You may want to check out their deployable app list, and maybe also check out CfA's github repository which has a lot of projects that may be useful, and their Civic Commons project which gathers the sw/infrastructure that cities are using.
...harder than it has to be.
Google Sites + Drive
The primary purpose of the site is to share information. This would also make it easier to have the town update/work with the site themselves.
with info about the town that does not change (name, location info, some pictures, etc)
2. Create the town's Facebook page, populate it with dynamic data, and hand over control of the account to the town manager (or whoever)
3. Embed Facebook data into your static html page
You can go Drupal or Joomla but do you really want to be responsible for security and upkeep? Joomla in particular gets hacked a LOT. Drupal is a nightmare to train newbs how to use.
If you have no budget, keep it all on paper.
Seriously, anything you pick, at all, will need ongoing long-term maintenance, security monitoring, etc ... the only thing worse than no system is an abandoned system.
If the town thinks its valuable, they should fund it appropriately (no matter what technology you use). Or get the scouts to run a bake sale or something.
Based on your stated requirements (no budget, not wanting to start from scratch etc) I'd suggest using one of the many pre-configured Drupal distributions like OpenPublic (http://drupal.org/project/openpublic) which is built specifically for the needs of government.There are many other distributions available at http://drupal.org/project/distributions. Using one of these will save you a lot of time.
much easier to put in place, plugins are simpler to put in place
The increased staffing required to develop and maintain it will drive your little town's population up to 20,000 in short order. Best of all, most of those new jobs will be for highly paid SharePoint consultants, so the town should get a lot more property tax revenues!
To see the mess this turns into in a few years. Relying on a volunteer using a platform and all products that they choose, none of with will have any sort of actual support model behind them is a recipe for disaster as soon as you become disenfranchised with it all. Seriously, take a look at the number of projects out there that start off and then die on the vine as soon as interest is lost, which in something like this will be very quickly once you get something running and interest wanes.
OpenPublic - http://drupal.org/project/openpublic
I've never used it but it's a Drupal distribution specific to your use case.
This is not pessimism; it's realism: stop while you're ahead, or at least hammer out an agreement in writing.
Doing any sort of web development for a large community, and gods forbid a government agency, is going to eat up a lot of your time -- time you've already said you don't have. Worse, though, is that it will never end... your involvement will become increasingly needed and even demanded as services fail or need to be expanded, or your site is hacked. How much liability are you assuming in designing what amounts to the PR page for a group of professional, elected lawyers?
You absolutely need to make sure that there are clearly-defined boundaries at every level of your involvement, preferably in the form of a contract, even if the work is completely voluntary.
It's not always cost-effective to host your own platform - you need hardware, power and cooling, a reliable internet connection with good upload speed, maintenance, backup, etc. and you get to live with a pager, There are plenty of cheap Linux hosts out there where all the possible software is available. As an example there is Bluehost where the $5/month hosting plan comes with a SimpleScripts subscription which allows you to deploy just about any application in a jiffy (including all the CMS, blogging and social media stuff you can think of, including Drupal). Of course for that price you can't expect stellar performance, there will be hundreds of other websites on the same machine.
If you want something more robust and you are open to other things than FOSS than have a look at Microsoft Azure. It's more expensive than cheap Linux hosting but for $25-$50/month you can have a very robust cloud setup (load balancing, backup, etc) and no additional license cost. And the nice thing on Azure is that you can deploy an configure a new CMS (like Joomla or DotNetNuke) using a click wizard, it's even more user-friendly than SimpleScripts, you get to choose the various options, not just the admin password. Also with Azure you get a 3 months free trial to see if you like it. And if you somehow can't sleep with the idea of a .Net webapp you can deploy PHP stuff - you can even host a Linux VM and run whatever you want on it but that would kinda defeat the purpose of using cloud services.
Whatever you do make sure you don't become the "owner" of a local setup. People will start to have unrealistic expectations and will be mad at you when "your" server is down because of a power or internet failure. If you really can't afford a few dollars a month go see an elected official and ask for guidance, I'm sure they can find a federal program to get you pennies.
lucm, indeed.
How about Webgui?
I would use CiviCRM [1] and WordPress if there were no other constraints. I am of course assuming that your town wants to be able to do email outreach, has events, and likely could use case management to handle citizen requests. If not, then there is little point in using CiviCRM or anything besides a plain CMS.
I personally would prefer seeing town meeting summaries as blog posts then PDFs (which is what most towns seem to do currently).
Although if you really have NO budget, then I guess WordPress.com hosted or Google Sites.
[1] http://civicrm.org/
I'll bet you can get pretty far with http://openpublicapp.com right out of the box, then add CiviCRM down the road if it comes to that.
I admittedly work for Phase2 Technology, the company that sponsors the OpenPublic project, but it's actually a great starting point for the type of site you're talking about:)
Just a few questions to see if you've even bothered to think about this beyond "Websites are cool, open is awesome!"...
These questions all come from firsthand experience.
1) Who will maintain the data on the site?
a) Does the city have the budget for them to do this?
b) Will there be resistance to the amount of work they have to do / training they have to take?
c) Will you train them?
2) What do the solicitors think? Will they even let you post what you want on the site?
3) Do the departments want the information available? Are they going to push back if they don't?
4) You have no budget. Who pays for or does the hosting? Registration? Admin stuff? Maintenance?
5) Do you actually have buy-in from the people you need it from, or are they just humouring you?
6) Are you being used? This is the sort of thing that municipalities (Yes, even your small one. Look at its tax roll sometime) can easily justify dumping $20k+ into
7) They have done a feasibility study, right?
8) How familiar are you with accessibility standards? Are there some you legally must meet to even put the site up?
9) Who is responsible for the site itself?
10) Are you prepared to have this project drag on for over a year?
11) Finally, the hardest one - are you certain you know the scope of the project?
Good luck, but don't get yourself in trouble...
Out of the box, it has probably more than what you want. http://openpublicapp.com/
--Steve
Also, RoR is a framework for creating a website from scratch, which is exactly what the poster did not want to do. There may be CMS packages written in RoR, but Ruby by itself will take a lot more work than he wants.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Use the Banshee PHP framework on the Hiawatha webserver. Both have a strong focus on security and offer good speed. Use stuff like Drupal, Joomla and Concrete5 if you want your website to be extremely slow. Use Wordpress if you want guarantee to be hacked.
It doesn't have to be like this. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
They went with a hosted solution though. Their harvest festival pages were especially quick.
Either https://www.liferay.com/ or http://www.alfresco.com/ fit your use case perfectly. Alfresco might fit a little better but Liferay might be a little easier IMHO. Sharepoint might also work but I've never seen an installation that isn't ugly as sin.
WordPress recently started a service specifically for municipalities: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/wordpress-for-cities/ Even with their paid upgrades, you would probably be saving money on development and you are paying for hosting or (bandwidth/power) anyway.
... outsource the hosting.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
2) What do the solicitors think?
Solicitation is a crime in the US.
You aren't going to make any money doing this, and it will be a time sink.
Get a Wordpress blog setup from one of the zillion different providers that offer that. Problem solved.
You don't say what's currently in place, and if the existing infrastructure is worth building on. But to avoid too many headaches in the future, I suggest looking at hosted solutions with simple front-ends such as SquareSpace or similar. You want to spend minimal effort setting this thing, and be able to train someone not skilled in web-programming to update the site and add documents. Setting up some complex beast made up of different frameworks glued together with custom code is a recipe for either you being miserable, or the town leaders being disappointed with what you gave them.
My small town of ~5,000 uses http://www.govoffice.com/ and it does everything you speak of.
Get an Enterprise server from IBM running AIX on POWER. You can start small by using some bug-ridden distro, security compromised X86 system, the roach motel of CMS's wordpress, or start with the mind set of protecting your small towns government documents.
Does your public library need a web front end to their catalog?
Does your parks and rec department want to post schedules and rosters and allow online registration for rec sports?
Do you need to allow property tax payments online?
Drupal has more backers and a larger community. The issues won't fall on your shoulders, however there is a learning curve. Once you're over the hump you will be good to go. I feel it is best option for building a small site initially and then you can add on over time.
These are absolutely terrific questions. If the city you're doing this for is big enough to have a city hall, police department, and an annual budget, then you'll need to coordinate all this. To much for you? Bow out NOW.
If this is for some place like Lake Woebegone, MN, which is a much smaller community, you may find it easier to deal with so few people. Otherwise, you're in for a really fun time (for widely varying values of fun).
for a minute i thought the my clean pc guy was back
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Whiskey.
Tango.
Foxtrot.
Perhaps try some rented build-a-site web service so that you don't have to install and babysit a physical box. You may be willing to do such, but if you move or get sick, they may not have a replacement technician.
Table-ized A.I.
Mostly good points above (I'm sure won't be a feasibility study. More likely there will just be a PIP "Put it in Production" test.),
Here's one more from firsthand experience.
What happens when there's a regime change among the town leaders?
In the best case, you must be prepared to replace new leader(s) faces and names everywhere the old faces and names were.
There will be a lot worst cases.
) The new town leader is a fanboi, and wants the site to follow the true faith.
) The new leader won't care, until the day (s)he does care.
) The new leader will not put in an ounce of effort to learn the system, but will blame you and system for all shortcomings.
) The new leader, who has not been on the site, say their friends think it's "hard to use". Ask them what's they mean, they have no clue.
) The new leader thinks they are experts, but have less clue than a "Ask Slashdotter".
and worst of all, the new leaders think they are experts, have the experience to actually be experts, and know how to delegate (to you).
Since, in a gig like this, you can never enforce your own conditions (like saying you won't amend the design on every whim) you have to let the tools enforce this for you.
If I was ever to try this again I would opt for an easily user-editable, hosted solution. Wordpress will be ideal: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/wordpress-for-cities/ You can cast your role as advising them on how to run it: information architecture; doing the limited number of graphics and showing people how to use the editor. Your role is not to continually re-design (just customise the template), nor to populate the whole thing. You'll also not have to put up with a 2am phone call from the Mayor to say your site is flagged as having malware and is littered with anti-city comments. Wordpress will deal with that for you.
I have used Drupal (and CiviCRM) for other sites and they are phenomenal tools...I just think for a 6,000 grouping they are overkill. And remember if the city wants personalisation, user accounts, billing, consultations etc. online then they really should be paying for someone to develop it for them (perhaps using those tools).
Hosted Wordpress will also help you see whether they are ready to run their own online affairs.
http://elgg.org/ A simple setup social network that can handle everything you've listed almost right out of the box. A couple of community plugins for additional features, slap a theme on there to make it look pretty and you're on your way. If/when you have a budget or some time to invest you can customize it pretty much any way you can think of.
No budget, and relying on you for (free) voluntary support? My only recommendation is to walk away as fast as you can.
As long as she doesn't get any subluxations...
No budget means don't do it. You will regret it and so will the person who is eventually paid to fix your half assed job.
I am often paid to fix things people do for free, and it those free projects are usually of such little quality that they may as well not even have been attempted in the first place.
Remember the ADA when coming up with your solution. If you use CAPTCHAs, make sure you provide one that has both audio and video. If you are using image links, make sure you support screen readers with the alt tag.
If people are posting documents make sure they are in an open format. Many municipalities use MS Office and will just post docx or xlsx files without thinking about it. I
Johnkoerner.com
Wow, Argument from incredulity on teh interwebs.
I've written rails apps that supported a very large newspaper's site, which got well over 15 MILLION pageviews per month. Never once did my apps stumble or crash.
Like anything else, you have to know what you're doing, boychik. Now go read pp 14-16 of the Pragmatic Programmer and learn a little.
Yeah, right.
Mezzanine is a CMS for Django.
It is out of the box simple to use and full featured. Connections to social media and comment services etc.
Another benefit is that it is a Django application; so it is possible to use django apps together with it.
I am building a web site for my collective housing myself using Mezzanine, django-wiki, django-schedule,
django-issues, django-auth-ldap, django-ldapdb.
Although, having been a webmaster for a small company myself I can only concur with those that give advice
about being mindful about time, effort, and cost. Even this small company took a lot of time to discuss with,
implement new features, and support. I can only imagine what a application potentially used by 6000 users
would bring to the table.
Troll? I was hoping for Funny. It was a US question, with a UK response. Lighten up, mods!
Some people have mentioned Joomla or Drupal - forget it.
Have a look at Atlassian Confluence, they have hosted options also. Atlassian University for training is both modestly priced and effective.
Trees of pages for agendas / minutes / can handle attachments with ease / export sections to PDF. Easy to customise layout and look/feel. Integrates with popular directory servers.
$0.02
I'm from Canada, you insensitive clod!
I think that what the poster really wants, doesn't exist, but should. And building it in Rails is a great idea. Open-source project? I'll bet a lot of people would be willing to pitch in. The project's already on Slashdot... Timothy, let's here about your specs - Slashdot, what could we build?
The question asker isn't timothy...
First, get written specifications from a town official who has the authority to approve the results. The specifications should indicate the sources of content and how the town expects the Web site to be hosted. The specifications should be testable; that is, it should be possible to determine whether or not the result indeed implements what was wanted. You definitely do not want to put in any effort that will then be rejected. If you get a negative response, you want to point to the specification as justification for what you created.
Second, read what experts have said about proper Web design. The most important thing is to adhere to W3C specifications; see http://www.w3.org/. That way, any problems by end-users in viewing the result can be attributed to the users' browsers and not to your creation. Also peruse Jacob Nielsen's Web site at http://www.useit.com/, especially his http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html and http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/guidelines.html. While the Viewable with Any Browser Campaign at http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/index.html is somewhat dated, much of it is still relevant. Finally, there are my own "Professional" Web Developers at http://www.rossde.com/internet/Webdevelopers.html (where I dissect the errors committed by professional Web developers) and My Web Page Design Criteria at http://www.rossde.com/internet/web_design.html (where I describe how I design my own Web pages). In my "Professional" Web Developers, pay special attention to Accessibility to make sure you do not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. My two Web pages that I cite here contain links to external Web sites with more information that may prove quite valuable.
Third, test your results. Use the W3C validators. Use http://validator.w3.org/ to make sure you have no HTML/XHTML errors. Use http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ to make sure you have not CSS errors.
At the moment they are very nice and friendly. At the moment they also hope they can get something out of it for free.
Now, this site WILL break. It WILL need updating and maintenance. They WILL call you.
Are you going to say no? Those people who considered a nice person may likely decide that you have simply wasted their time in giving them an unusable mess. None of them can fix it, and they can't keep using it, so by definition it has to be defined as a terrible, unusuable mess and waste of time. If you turn down perpetual free support requests IT IS VERY LIKELY THAT YOU GET MADE OUT TO BE A BAD GUY.
"I have the opportunity to help improve / replace the website of my small U.S. town (~6000 people).
The website for our small home town library is maintained by a four-county cooperative. Its appearance and resources are far better than we could have hope to achieve on our own.
It makes sense to work with your neighbors. To budget and staff a project realistically.
Download a copy of Wordpress to an outsourced web server hosting account (many secure options available for ~$100/year). It takes 3 minutes to setup.
Wordpress's backend interface is the easiest to use and understand for folks who just need to share information and documents with others. There isn't the level of complexity (out of the box, but it's available if needed) that other CMSs have (like Drupal). Drupal is not recommended if you're not already familiar with Drupal.
Then pick one of the attractive themes from the thousands available, load in a few helpful plugins, and give accounts to folks who may be responsible for different areas of content.
Wordpress can easily grow if your needs grow. But out-of-the-box, it's so easy to use and manage, it's the no-brainer choice.
--
Psych Central
http://psychcentral.com/
http://en.wordpress.com/cities/. Its as easy to use as anything out there. There are more ways to extend it (without writing code) than anything else out there.
I found an organization, "digital towpath", to help small govenments meet such needs. Here's a link to a document about design and secure implementation from their site:
http://digitaltowpath.org/content/Generic/View/54:field=documents;/content/Documents/File/112.pdf
The submissive are always in control. It's the nature of the beast. At the end, she got extactly what she wanted, didn't she? That said, no reason you can't enjoy it now, for it looks like you are comfortable in your new role. Good luck.
Open Public: http://openpublicapp.com/ (Open source Drupal like whitehouse.gov) Achieve City http://www.achievecity.com/ (SaaS version of Open Public tailored for muni) City of DeLeon http://www.cityofdeleon.org/ (WordPress theme developed by Luke Fretwell of GovFresh) +100 to all the folks who said to be sure you have a long term service plan
Recently, I spent 3 months as a maintainer of about a dozen production Drupal websites.
That job was, by far, the worst job I've ever had in 11 years as a PHP programmer.
Drupal is a horrible, terribly programmed piece of shit that makes life extraordinarily difficult for everything from install to administration to development to deployment. It is BEYOND bloated, dogged slow, kludgy, broken, insecure, half-baked, lacking in good community support, and generally awful through and through. It is an ugly bitch to code in on multiple levels--massive byzantine array structures to do anything, slow variable functions, the object orientation it has is pointless, obnoxious database schema and proprietary SQL (yes, really), the Javascript Drupal object...
I could go into further detail...I came up with 39 reasons as part of my regular venting in that job why I will NEVER touch it again or so much as own up to having used it in the past.
Trust me, do NOT deal with that crap. Even worse than using it would be to throw that white elephant on a third party (the municipality) that has no concept of how to deal with it, and would very likely have to pay out the ass for the rare PHP programmer that specializes in Drupal to deal with it when you've moved on.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
I always get frustrated when I have to dig deep and manually read over scanned non-OCR'd PDFs.
Honestly, all I want is for all the documents and laws to be available. I would think that SVN with a web component would be great to be able to see the current laws, including the ability to 'go back in time', and it would work for posting minutes and agendas as well.
I'm not overly concerned with -presentation-, having the data available in a digital form alone is a major step forward, and you can build out from there.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Thanks for the insight and well wish!
It's not Tuttle, Oklahoma is it?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Were you sitting on a fence chewing a cornstalk while you were writing that?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I give the parent post 8 out of 10.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why are you doing this for free?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
If the town leaders like to go "more open" as in "more direct democracy", have a look at Liquid Feedback.
As a reference you might refer them to the German district Freisland. (The decision to implement LF has been made meanwhile)
If security is an issue, and depending on our hosting budget, you may want ot consider:
Plone http://plone.org/
Alfresco http://www.alfresco.com/
DotCMS http://dotcms.com
Jahia http://www.jahia.com
Visit here:
http://openpublicapp.com/
one of the available Drupal sites might inspire you AND give you a contact in a municipality to bounce questions off of.
You should look into the Web Experience Toolkit: https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew/.
The Web Experience Toolkit is an open source framework for developping Web sites that was created by the Canadian government, and is now developped by a community that spans various levels of government, the private sector and the open source community. It integrates with various CMSs, including Drupal (https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew-drupal) and WordPress (https://github.com/wet-boew/wet-boew-wordpress). This gives you the flexibility of using whatever platform suits your needs to host your site. It also allows you to create themes to adapt the layout and visual look and feel to your needs and branding and uses responsive Web design to make sites mobile-friendly.
You can see the various components of the Web Experience Toolkit in action on the Working Examples page: http://wet-boew.github.com/wet-boew/demos/index-eng.html. You can also see the responsive views in action using the responsive emulator: http://wet-boew.github.com/wet-boew/test/responsive-emulator.html.
For examples of Web sites currently using the Web Experience Toolkit, see:
Industry Canada: http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/icgc.nsf/eng/home
Service Canada: http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/home.shtml
Get Cyber Safe: http://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx
City of Ottawa: https://ottawa.ca/en
Open Source Alliance of Canada: http://www.osacan.org/
You're just looking to (essentially) display data right? Wordpress is the way to go. Unless your application needs to be able to control the city's traffic and water pump systems, you really wouldn't need a web framework.
I've used a lot of CMSs and none of them made me want to break stuff as much as Drupal did.
My advice would be wordpress because the community is very supportive plus to a noob friendly admin area.
Try to ditch as much functionality as you can to make your task simple and use plugins out of the box - trying to mod them to add functionality will eat up your life!