We’ve made a list based on the features you’ll get out of the box, what we’ve made for London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham council and what we’d love to build if we got the right funding from another council or interested project.
Core content types
You can read more about these on the localgov drupal demo site so we’ll only list them here:
- Service pages
- Service landing pages
- Step by steps
- Guides
- Directories
- Events
- Subsites
- Newsroom
- News article
Chicken content types (made for LBHF)
- Blogs
- Estate inspection reports: Allows editors to upload information about the inspection fast, useful when there’s a lot of them. Also keeping the same accessible format each time.
- External links
- FID pages
- Publication pages (coming soon to LGD thanks to LBHF)
- Subsite homepages - these allow you to add any content under the homepage and it’ll automatically convert the Subsites theme)
Some content types automatically come with a layout system which allows you to drag and drop content into different columns of the page, a page can have a lot of sections making it very customisable for editors. We can choose between a few layouts, one column, two columns and three columns.
At Chicken we’ve provided LBHF with a few more and allowed these page sections on most content types. Our layouts are similar but we have refined them to work in a more responsive way that works with our design also allowing different background colours per page section. These are fully accessible and work with any kind of content block/paragraph.
Content blocks & Paragraphs
There are a lot of ways to display and reuse content in LocalGov Drupal. In Drupal these tools are called Paragraphs, they are a component of fields which make a preconfigured display, meaning that content editors don’t need to know HTML/CSS/JS to make content which is consistent throughout the site.
- Alert banners
- Contact
- Subscribe panels
- From library
- Accordions
- Banners (with and without text and links - called primary and secondary)
- Image
- Link
- Text
- Topic list builder
- Call out boxes
- Document tables
- Fact boxes
- A series of teasers (Featured subsites/Featured campaign/Featured teaser/Newsroom teasers)
- Key contacts
- Key facts
- Labelled icons
- Quotes
- Tabs
- Tasks
- Tables
- Topic list builders
- Video
Chicken content blocks and paragraphs
- Publications banner
- Curated teasers (LBHF wanted to do their teasers in an entirely different way so we disabled every LGD one and made our own)
- Details expander
- Lookup forms (migrating legacy bin collection, roadworks and election polling station lookups and allowing LBHF to embed them into any page - as many times as they’d like)
- Newsletter sign up (similar to subscribe panels)
- Timelines
- Embed (embedding iframes in a secure way, only by trusted people)
- Embed block (this is mostly to add automatically generated lists into your content, such as a top ten most read news block or advertising blocks)
- Embed webform (again drupals forms can be embedded anywhere into a page without the assistance of a developer)
- Table of contents (this was reused for Publications but LBHF can use this everywhere)
We’ve also extended the image paragraph extensively to include image alt text overrides, credits and captions.
Most images can be a range of preferred sizes with different styles depending on the image size, making it easier for editors to ensure consistency but just enough variation to be interesting.
Banner images have special controls to allow the image either page width or screen width.
Geographic information
Maps for directories can have either place pins or areas.
Each directory venue has geolocation to automatically generate a map for the venue.
We have extended the address information for editors to be able to include accessibility and transport information for the building. This information is the repeated on all venue information that uses that address, considerably reducing time editing and updating pages, and ensuring accurate information to all events, classes, meetings that citizens attend are available to everyone.
Multilingual
Including an Irish service catalogue
Integrations
- ModernGov
- Ofsted
- Open referral
- Outpost
- CQC integration: (we’ve done this and there’s a LGD module)
Search
Localgov Drupal comes with a basic search page but it’s easily customised with Solr or ElasticSearch with little help from a developer.
Extending directories, news and other lists to work using the same technique that search uses instead of simple views means we get better facets/filters on the sidebars. They are much more customisable and user friendly.
Workflow and content moderation
All content can be controlled by different groups of users, these groups are called roles. A person can be assigned many roles, but these roles make it easy to keep track of who can do what and revoke/enable permissions as required.
Content can be forced through a workflow that allows the content to be worked on in draft mode, published at a set time (or on the spot) and set to be reviewed and published by someone with reviewing permissions.
Content can be set to be reviewed after set amount of time
Draft content can be previewed by people who aren’t logged in via a special link with a set time for the link to expire. Perfect for getting a counsellor to approve what have been written.
Webforms
Very customisable forms are what Drupal does well, you can enable the module and create some very impressive forms with this tool. There’s plenty of documentation on this module and LocalGov Drupal hasn’t had to modify it to work here.
Things we’ve contributed back (or will do when we get a chance!)
- HTML publications
- Subsites homepages
- CKEditor 5 compatibility
- Estate inspection report content types (if enough people want them)
Things we want to build and contribute back
- Dark mode/high contrast/calm mode!
- Extend publications further so we can import PDF content into the page to save editors time.
- A sustainability initiative for LGD
- Article age banners for news items
- Image galleries for microsites (wedding venues etc)
- Election tools: Countdown timers, results/poll trackers.
- Better events listings/calendars - we think this is a big project with different results depending on the types of events and would love to do some indepth user research here.
- Extend the table paragraph to switch between charts and tables, like gov.uk does.
- Better lists, with icons for easy read content
We will try and keep this list updated with all the good work that LocalGov Drupal do, please do get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions for how to improve this content. The goal is to make it easier for councils to understand all that LocalGov Drupal has to offer
(I’ll add images as soon as I can!)
If you’d like to sponsor any of this work or would like our help in building you a LocalGov Drupal website, please get in touch: email hello@wearechicken.co.uk