Drupal Training 7: LocalGov Drupal extra features

Blogs

A lot of councils are now starting to embrace the idea of blogging. As opposed to "news" which might be a little more formal, blogging is being used for things like "Web Team Week Notes" (a weekly update on what the web team have been working on), "CEO's Message" (a monthly missive from the CEO), etc.

The LocalGov Drupal blogs suite has 2 content types:

• Blog Channel - This is a container content type so you can have as many blogs as you wish, all separated with their own URL (e.g. /blog/week-notes or /blog/ceo-messages)
• Blog Post - The individual blog entry that is placed within a channel (e.g. Week Notes for week-ending September 24th)

Get it by running `composer require localgovdrupal/localgov_blogs`.

Elections

Elections is a very complex feature that was developed over a number of months. It allows you to create a landing page for an election, wards within that landing page, and elections results pages per ward. All this comes together then into graphs and charts to show voting numbers and results.

Get it by running `composer require localgovdrupal/localgov_elections`.

Publications

One of the big problems of the web these days is how many PDF documents are uploaded, and then are very hard to read on small screen devices. They are also very difficult to get indexed by search engines. And because they are large, they can use up a lot of server resources if you need to download the whole document (e.g. a 200MB city development plan) just to read one paragraph of it.

To solve this issue, we have created the Publications module. This allows editors to create an individual page for each section of a document and add all of these pages into a "publication". Then it's possible to

1. Link directly to a page in the document
2. Index the content in your own search engine (or an external one such as Google)
3. Be understood by screenreaders and other assistive technology
4. Be responsive on mobile devices

If you really want to upload the document, well you can do so on the "Publication Cover Page". That's the best of both worlds.

Get it by running `composer require localgovdrupal/localgov_elections`.

Promo Page

Sometimes you want a page on your website that has a bit of flair to it. Hero images, rich media, accordions, background colours on certain sections, etc.

Originally built for the Microsites Platform, the Promo Page content type is your new best friend for rich text pages.

Get it by running `composer require localgovdrupal/localgov_page`.

Filed Under:

1. LocalGov Drupal
2. Drupal
3. Drupal Training