Those of us who firmly believe that Drupal is the best CMS for government websites are in good company. In fact, that’s why we’re an approved LocalGov Drupal supplier.
The number of government bodies using the Drupal CMS is steadily increasing. It is secure, scalable, accessible out of the box, naturally cost efficient, readily connected with other systems, and backed by a million-strong Drupal community. The Drupal ecosystem's 40,000+ core and contributed modules are one of the key causes driving Drupal's involvement in the world's accelerating progress toward digital governance.
It might be difficult to pick through the alternatives and go on with confidence that the best options are being used when there is so much to choose from. Multiple government customers for whom we've lately had the luxury of creating, designing, and converting Drupal sites has resulted in a depth and breadth of experience and expertise that we can offer here at Promet Source.
Here's a rundown of a couple of our favourites, as well as some recommendations for essential Drupal modules for government.
Levels of complex permissions management
Content moderation
Drupal 9 has a content management feature out of the box that can handle a basic level of permissions and procedures for producing and moving content from draught to published stages.
A solid content management system should look at more than just how your information is shown to the user. It should provide you the flexibility you need to run a seamless and efficient content publishing operation. To provide consistent material, teams must often collaborate with content teams. Managing a publishing process becomes tiresome and chaotic without a controlled editorial workflow, where material travels from one stage to the next. Enter Drupal 9's Content Moderation module.
Content editors and marketing teams can manage their editing processes with ease thanks to the Drupal 9 Content Moderation module. The module manages and creates multiple process phases and transitions in combination with the Workflows module.
In Drupal 8.2, the Content Moderation module was originally presented as an experimental module. It was based on the "Workbench Moderation" module that was donated. A stable version was published with Drupal 8.5, and it is now a Drupal core module!
Stay on top of spam
Honeypot
Digital government necessitates the capacity to do business online, which often necessitates the completion and submission of online forms free of spambots, whose effects range from a time-consuming irritant to the whole or partial disablement of a site's operation. The provided Drupal module is our favourite for preventing spam.
The Honeypot module adds an invisible field and a timestamp to every form to prevent spam bots from completing forms on a Drupal site. Humans are unable to perceive the invisible field and hence refuse to fill it in. The form will produce an error if the invisible field is filled out by a bot. Bots may be detected using the timestamp function, which is based on the completion of a form in an unusually short amount of time. Honeypot requires a certain period of time before the form can be submitted successfully.
Secure SSO
SimpleSAMLphp Authentication
Government customers want sign-on capabilities that are both reliable and simple to maintain. The Drupal SimpleSAMLphp Authentication module accomplishes these goals by integrating Drupal with SimpleSAMLphp, a single-sign-on authentication system. The module is completely customizable, allowing for the assignment of very detailed internal permission levels.
Access to related content is simple
Entity reference module
The Drupal Entity Reference module provides a vital feature that Promet uses extensively on every government website we create. The module may dramatically improve the user experience by alerting them to related material, which might be a node, a person, or a taxonomy word, using the Entity Reference field.
Multilingual options are available
Drupal translation modules
Even at the local level, government websites are required to cater to a diverse set of constituents who may speak a variety of languages. Drupal became multilingual out of the box with Drupal 8, thanks to a large number of translation modules:
The Content Translation module to build a replica web page in the desired language, including all content, comments, custom blocks, taxonomy terms, users, and other content entities.
Entity Translation enables you to translate specific components or fields on a page, rather than whole nodes.
Merge Translations allows you to combine nodes from various languages into a single, translated node.
LocalGov Drupal for Government sites
Drupal offers tens of thousands of modules to provide the best online solution for public-sector clients, but are you aware of the LocalGov Drupal initiative?
LocalGov Drupal is a publicly owned asset that enhances citizen digital experiences, saves money, and improves service results. The participating local government bodies have used the Local Digital Declaration to create a common pool of code, resources, research, and knowledge, allowing them to provide better digital experiences to residents at a cheaper cost while also generating a publicly owned asset.
It is created and managed by a group of developers, content designers, and digital executives from around the United Kingdom. The independence, flexibility, and community are all appealing to web teams.
And we can help. As well as being Drupal development experts, we also have significant experience hosting public sector websites. Specifically, we helped Croydon and Cumbria council to connect to LocalGov Drupal.