LocalGov Drupal Microsites Demo Module launched

Why I Built a Demo Module for LocalGov Microsites

LocalGov Microsites lets a council spin up standalone sites, for example a library service, a local park, a community campaign. It's a great platform. But every time I needed to show someone what it actually looks like, I was rebuilding the same demo content from scratch. And the same frustration each time I needed to fix a bug or build a feature.

So this week I published LocalGov Microsites Demo: a module that spins up three working microsites, six demo users, and real sample content in one install.

What it does

Install it, and you get:

• Three microsites
  • Scarfolk Independent Living
  • Scarfolk People's Park
  • Scarfolk Digital Blog
• Six demo users - two per site, with controller and editor roles, so you can show off permissions as well as content
• Real sample content - groups, nodes, taxonomy, media, files — not lorem ipsum
• Domain config already wired up — hostnames, site names, slogans, and front pages per group

Run it on DDEV and the three sites are live on their own local domains in minutes. If you want custom domains, just edit the site settings page for each site.

Why it needed to exist

A few reasons stacked up until this became worth building:

Client demos. When a potential client asks "what does microsites actually look like," I want to click through a working example, not talk in the abstract.

Internal buy-in. The harder sell is often inside the council, not outside it. Comms, IT, and service leads all want to see it running before they'll back it. A demo they can click through settles more arguments than a slide deck.

Faster bug fixing. Microsites bugs are often about how sites interact — domains, groups, permissions. Previously, reproducing one meant hand-building that setup every time. Now it's just one install away.

Better test coverage. Automated tests need realistic fixtures. This module gives LocalGov Microsites a standard, reusable dataset to test against, which means we can write more tests, faster.

Because it was a genuinely interesting problem. Domain-per-group config, multi-site content relationships, realistic fixture data — this is the kind of structural puzzle I enjoy taking apart.

The takeaway

If a feature is hard to explain or hard to test, the fix usually isn't a better pitch or more test-writing discipline - it's removing the setup cost. Once demoing and testing microsites took one command instead of an afternoon, the bugs got easier to fix and the harder conversations got easier to have.

If you're running LocalGov Drupal and want to show microsites to a client or your own team, grab the module and spin it up on DDEV.

If you want help with LocalGov Drupal and/or LocalGov Microsites, contact me.