Drupal Training 9: LocalGov Drupal Microsites Platform

The LocalGov Drupal microsites platform is a powerful tool designed to empower local authorities to manage their fleet of microsites. Microsites are perfect for specific campaigns, events, and community projects.

The Problem to be Solved

You have a fleet of microsites, but ...

1. Some sites are running fine
2. No one knows the passwords for some other sites
3. The agency that built other sites has gone out of business
4. Some sites use Drupal, others Wordpress, others some custom coded solution
5. We don't know how many microsites we have

The Solution

Governance

The LocalGov Drupal Microsites Platform was designed to solve this problem. With this platform you can create and manage all of your microsites in the one platform using a single installation of Drupal, while still having custom URLs for each microsite. Governance is much less of an issue this way.

You can also have a visual on exactly who has access to which microsites, and add more people or lock others out, without needing to go to your supplier agency for help.

Design Consistency

Given the "inheritance" nature of how we build the LocalGov Microsites Base theme, you can create a base template for your platform and then all microsites on the platform can use it. This means you won't have each site "kind of" looking the same and "kind of" following your brand guidelines: each site will look exactly like you have decided it should.

However, due to the same inheritance system, it's possible to then make small modifications to individual (or a group) of sites. For example, if your main brand colour is red but you build a microsite for St. Patrick's Day, you might swap out the red for a green just on that microsite. That can be done in seconds and will be live instantly.

And then, if you want a fully custom design for any particular microsite, you can have that too. And even better, the design can be created right within the UI of the microsites platform.

Cost Savings

Since the microsites platform is just one installation of Drupal, it means all of your microsites are covered by the same hosting cost. If you make any updates to your base theme, all of your microsites will get it at the same time. Many of the things you might want to change - colours, fonts, spacing, footer information, etc can all be done through the UI.

How to use it

It's pretty simple, really.

You install the platform, then create users with a role of "Microsite Controller". These controllers can then create as many microsites as they wish. 

As they create microsites, they will also add users to the platform and give them a role of "Trusted Microsites Editor". Then they will add those editors to whichever microsites they are allowed to edit.

Within the UI of each microsite there are settings for colours, fonts, spacing, logos, etc. Set them to whatever you want, and you now have a shiny microsite.

Content Types

Microsites have a number of content types by default, such as:

• Directories
• Blogs
• News
• Events
• Basic Pages
• and you can add more if you wish.

Going Live

Once you are happy with the microsite, you can click the 'Published' checkbox and your site will be live instantly. To take it offline, just uncheck the 'Published' checkbox.

Need a hand, got questions? I'm here to help.

Filed Under:

1. LocalGov Drupal
2. Drupal
3. Drupal Training