News

Blog from Oliver Hannan, Product Manager at the National Archives, formerly of London Councils.

I’ve been involved with the LocalGov Drupal project since early 2020. There’s been a decent amount written about what councils can get from the project, a fair bit of documentation on the impressive velocity developers have achieved in sprints and some videos on enthusiastic sharing of skills. All of this goes a good way to highlight the project, the ethos and the mutual benefit member councils are getting.

I thought I’d go further and outline what I’ve personally got from being part of LocalGov Drupal. I’ve worked in a range of digital roles since starting out as web content editor. I think it’s worth highlighting the job titles.

We attacked sprint 3 with great gusto and achieved some incredible results.
We scored on most of goals, while having a bit less resource on the sprint with bank holiday and some half term leave. 
This sprint, my favourite image is the 'double diamond' design process, more on this below.

Sprint 2 completed with our sprint review today, delivering lots of valuable work on multiple strands, including new user personas, improved flexibility for alert banners and a full Drupal 9 release (finally!).

We've finished sprint 1 on Tuesday (and started sprint 2 on Wednesday) and the project is gathering momentum once again. This is the first of 10 sprints of development funded by the MHCLG's LocalDigital Fund and overseen by Cumbria County Council. 

Our council has joined the LocalGov Drupal code sharing collaboration. It is a key building block in redeveloping our website in 2021 as we transition from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9. In this post, I’d like to share why we joined and our experience to date.

Although I work for an AWS partner, I've always shied away from AWS CloudFormation, their orchestration technology. However, when I got talking to Will here at LocalGovDrupal about reducing the barrier to entry for organisations who want to use the distribution as a starting point, a plan formed.