For Developers
LocalGov Drupal is a community of developers, digital leaders and content designers from local councils all across the UK.
We work together to produce a Drupal distribution (built on Drupal 9) that is freely available to all participating councils.
LocalGov Drupal is not a supplier, we do not directly carry out development work for councils.
However there is a big development community of developers at councils, supplier companies and freelancers, all with a shared interest in open source and building more and better public assets.
We always welcome more developers and agencies into the community to further improve and enhance the distribution.
Why choose LocalGov Drupal?
Technical excellence
We aim to follow Drupal coding standards and best practices in open source development. We include automated checks for coding standards with phpcs.
It is packed with features and developers familiar with Drupal should find LocalGov Drupal easy to install, adapt and extend.
Modular architecture
From the start we have tried to keep functionality modular and optional. There are over 30 modules specific to the distribution to allow each council to deploy what they need without using all of the content types and functionality.
It was easy to find out where the code was coming from, I could check how it was built, or how it was working. It was really clear, the code was really nice, and I could read it well.
Flexibility
While smaller councils could use LocalGov Drupal without too much customisation, we also see the distribution also as a starting point for extension. Many councils choose to extend the default functionality with custom development for their sites and we aim to take this into account when releasing future updates.
Automated testing
Following the lead of Drupal core and other distributions, we include phpunit tests for as much functionlaity as posisble. Github automation is set to run automated tests against pull requests to help us avoid introducing bugs with new changes.
“As a standalone project, I do find it an absolute joy to use. This unlocks developer capacity on our side, to do the new things that the product team wants, that potentially could be contributed back upstream. It's a place where we can then spend less time fighting those fires and more time doing the new fun stuff.
Peer review
Guidelines on contributing changes encourage peer review of all non-trivial changes to code and we have regular calls to review and discuss pull requests. Developers find this regular peer review hugely valuable to help maintain code quality but also to learn from each other.
Community and collaboration
We encourage all councils and development teams to extend with re-use in mind and to contibute code and experience back to the project to allow other councils to benefit. It is this spririt of collaboration, shared functionality and peer learning that is making LocalGov Drupal so valuable to all councils and developers involved.
Easy to try out
Any developer with composer, docker and lando installed can run our quick start install detailed in the README.md file in the installation profile.
We have included the localgov_demo module to install demonstration content across all content types.
You can even get a free 30 day trial of LocalGov Drupal on AWS - see the Resources page for details.
If you would like to find out more or have any questions just drop us a line at hello@localgovdrupal.org. We are always happy to chat about LocalGov Drupal, provide a demo of the platform, or show how councils are using it.
If you're planning on doing a migration project I would say 100% go for it, there's no question, it was a massive time saver. And it will relieve you of several headaches in the early days.