Published: May 21, 2025

Need LocalGov Drupal Training? Here's what you need to consider.

Here's a brief outline of some topics to consider if you need to upskill your team for LocalGov Drupal development.

Training Your Developers for LocalGov Drupal

As a highly-opinionated CMS, implementing LocalGov Drupal successfully requires developers to have a good grasp of specific concepts and tools crucial for managing and optimizing your site. Below is a loose outline focused on guiding developer training to leverage LocalGov Drupal effectively.

Drupal

Local Development with DDEV

DDEV is a popular local development environment setup for Drupal. Trainers should emphasize the installation process, benefits of containerization, and the simplification of development environments, ensuring a consistent developer experience across different machines.

Basic Drupal Concepts

Developers need to understand Drupal's core concepts such as nodes, terms, blocks, and views. An understanding of config management (it's easy once you get your head around it) is also necessary.

Site Building

Site building involves creating content types, lists, and page components. Training should offer hands-on experience in using Drupal's admin interface to structure content types and page components (using paragraphs module in LocalGov Drupal) and build dynamic pages and lists efficiently.

Extending Drupal

Drupal’s extensibility through modules is a key feature. Developers should know the difference between when to use a module on Drupal.org and when to write a custom module. Training should include creating simple custom modules and using contributed modules to avoid unnecessary custom code.

Theming Drupal

A comprehensive understanding of the libraries system, CSS system, JavaScript system, and Twig templates is necessary for theming. As well as that, developers should have an understanding of frontend PHP - preprocess functions, views pre-render functions, etc. Trainers should focus on creating custom themes and understanding best practices for designing maintainable and performance-optimized themes. We have a really nice theme generator for LocalGov Drupal.

LocalGov Drupal

Features Out of the Box

LocalGov Drupal offers specific features that cater to local government needs. Some of these include directrories, guides, step-by-steps, news, events, and of course the services suite. Training sessions should cover these built-in features, showcasing how they can save time and increase efficiency in project delivery.

Building and Interaction

Understanding how features are built and interact is crucial. Developers should learn how different components connect, ensuring seamless integration for user-friendly interfaces and functionality.

Theme System Design

The theme system in LocalGov Drupal is designed to be flexible. You can get lots done by writing only a small amount of code, but knowing all the built-in features to allow you to do this takes time to master. Developers should be trained on adapting the generated theme to align with their branding while maintaining adherence to standards such as for accessibility, performance, etc.

Maintainable Site/Theme Development

Building a site/theme maintainably involves using best practices in development and ongoing support. Training should include strategies for creating clean, modular code that allows for future enhancements.

DevOps

Deployment Processes

Effective deployment processes are essential for smooth transitions from development to production. Developers need to be familiar with tools and techniques for deploying changes safely and efficiently.

Backup Strategy

A robust backup strategy ensures data integrity and quick recovery in emergencies. Training should include setting up regular backups of content and configurations to minimize data loss risks.

Adding New Features in the Future

Planning for future growth includes understanding how to integrate new features without disrupting existing functionality. Training should cover best practices in version control, coding standards, and testing to ensure sustainability and scalability.

Can't wait until you find your perfect training partner?

Here's a few links to get you started in the meantime.

LGD Docs - https://docs.localgovdrupal.org/devs/
LGD YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgOTBrkZvJwCuODRpHxZIIA
Some of my video tutorials - https://www.youtube.com/@markyconroy/search?query=localgov
Drupal developer docs - https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop

Investing in structured training for developers to work with LocalGov Drupal ensures the creation of sustainable, adaptable, and powerful websites that can effectively serve the needs of local governments.