Justice Health NSW prison portal

A controlled-access subsite inside the Justice Health NSW platform, built for a population that needed reach without exposure. Token-based access, IP-bounded delivery, custom theming — and the workflow to manage content for it safely.

Background

Justice Health and Forensic Mental Health Network provides healthcare to people in contact with the NSW criminal justice system, including those in prisons. Reaching that audience effectively means publishing health information, multimedia and forms in places they can actually access — including from inside prison networks — while keeping that content separate from the public-facing Justice Health website.

In 2021, Justice Health commissioned the build of a dedicated private subsite for the prison context. The brief required a content area distinct from the main site, with workflow, access controls, and presentation appropriate to the audience and the operating environment.

Solution

The subsite was implemented inside the existing Justice Health Plone platform using the Lineage subsite plugin — making the section appear as its own site, with its own theme adjustments, while still being editable alongside the main site by authorised Justice Health staff. We removed the main-site theme elements that wouldn't make sense in the subsite context (the public footer, NSW red feedback widget, social media links, and other references to the main Justice Health site).

Content access was controlled through two complementary mechanisms. IP-based restriction limited the subsite to specified network ranges. On top of that, the Tokenrole plugin was extended to support a new "internally published" workflow state, allowing Justice Health to issue revocable, expiring share URLs that grant Member-role access to specific content sections — page-level or section-level, as the use case required.

A custom "publish internally" workflow state sits between draft and public publication, giving Justice Health staff a place to put content that's been approved for internal release but not for the open web.

Scope and content

Within the initial build, we uploaded the site structure (six top-level headings, a feature-tiled landing page, 20 content pages, five videos), with Justice Health responsible for ongoing content management. The platform sits under PretaGov's ongoing managed hosting on AWS Sydney with full data sovereignty, alongside the main Justice Health site.

Why this matters

Health information that reaches prison populations has been shown to improve outcomes both during incarceration and after release. Most CMS platforms can host private content, but few make it practical to publish controlled-access material at this level of granularity — page-level access tokens, network-bounded delivery, distinct theming — without standing up an entirely separate system. Building the subsite inside the same Plone platform let Justice Health's existing content team manage both the public site and the prison portal from one tool, with one workflow, while keeping them functionally isolated.