Annertech ramps up LocalGov Drupal contributions

Annertech has been involved with the LocalGov Drupal project since its inception, working with councils both in the UK and in Ireland.

Our public sector work and our experience in Drupal means that we’ve laid the foundation for best practices, which we’re excited to share with the LocalGov Drupal community. 

LocalGov Drupal – a CMS created by councils for councils – is having a great impact, and has already been adopted by more than 55 councils in the UK and Ireland. These councils are reaping the benefits, including time and cost savings, a tried-and-tested product that is run specifically for councils by councils, and the advantages of having a community that supports each other. 

Part of Annertech’s LocalGov Drupal contributions will focus on the following goals:
 

1. Making things easier to use and understand for councils and developers,
2. Improvements and features,
3. Technical governance, and
4. Media and images.

1. Making things easier to use and understand for councils and developers 

With so many available features (there are 91 LocalGov Drupal code projects at the time of writing – and counting) it can be hard to see the wood for the trees, especially for people engaging for the first time with LocalGov Drupal. The learning curve can be steeper still for people who haven’t used Drupal in any capacity before. 

Features

I think we can improve visibility and comprehension of the features by collecting them in visual formats. Some early discussions around using Storybook, a component library, to present features is one such way that this could be achieved. Short-form series of videos and visual documentation are others. 

Technical information

For developers there is the question of how these features interact in a technical way. 

Nothing beats the experience of developing sites with LocalGov Drupal but, again, for those new to the project or who will only interact with a small part of the codebase it can be a challenge to get up and running or to dip in and out of the code in a way that will follow best practices. 

I struggle to digest large passages of text so I’m keen to find ways to present technical information for developers in a more visual format too.

2. Improvements and features 

LocalGov Drupal is continuously being improved, with new features added regularly. 

As we at Annertech and others in the LocalGov Drupal space develop websites, each feature request and issue can present an opportunity to make an improvement or share a feature that can be used by other councils. 

For each candidate there is the question of the benefit and the impact of the change to others, so discussions with technical leaders and users to establish requirements and approach are vital. The goal is always to improve things as much as possible upstream and contribute them to the LocalGov Drupal project. 

For the long-term health of all the LocalGov Drupal projects it’s generally better if code is improved and maintained in one place. But there are always exceptions to the rule and some factors that may indicate it’s best for the change to remain in custom code in the individual project. 

Some examples of those exceptions are: 

• The change meets a unique need or will not be widely adopted. 
• The change will have an undesired impact or create bugs for other people when they pull down the code to their websites. 
• The change will leave technical debt for the LocalGov maintainers to maintain that feature over many years to come. 

In these cases though, we can still share knowledge by writing, recording and discussing what we learned and what we did with the community. 

There are a couple of features that use a similar technical pattern that are currently in discussion. One such feature is a Microsoft Copilot AI Chatbot that can be added to websites. 

Such a project does exist in the LocalGov Drupal space. We’re looking at how to make this feature context-aware so it can appear only on certain pages, as well as to be GDPR compliant by respecting cookie preferences. 

That’s not all that difficult to achieve in an individual project, but if we can share as much as possible then it’s for the benefit of all.

3. Technical governance 

The LocalGov Drupal technical governance group maintains the project and lead on technical direction. One of its tasks is to make decisions about the system architecture. 

That means making decisions about how to include new LocalGov Drupal features and Drupal core and contrib features.

We have had many discussions in recent weeks about Single Directory Components. These are an innovation in Drupal that can help with code quality and reusability and could help future proof LocalGov Drupal by plugging into Experience Builder and AI capabilities that are under development as part of DrupalCMS. 

They would also help toward our effort of making components more visible. John Albin Wilkins and Christopher Torgalson have joined me and other technical leaders in figuring out how we can best implement them without impacting the many websites that rely on the localgov_base theme.

We are always mindful not to introduce unexpected changes and we want to communicate the technical roadmap to users, so people know what’s in the pipeline. 

Much of this work happens remotely so it was great to catch up with people face to face recently at DrupalCamp England, where Finn Lewis gave a presentation on rewarding contribution in LocalGov Drupal.

Examples 

There’s a project to migrate the code from Github to Drupal.org, which will make it easier for people to contribute and to track contributions. This will support the new credits system. 

I think there is the potential for the move to assist with understanding the features too, as we can make use of the rich drupal.org module pages and link to documentation and guides specific to those features. 

Drupal 11 upgrades 

We have a Drupal 11 upgrade release that we’re testing to find any problems, so that when people upgrade the path should be smooth. We’re also writing release notes and update steps that people can follow.

4. Media and images 

One of the most requested focus areas from the community was making images and media easier to use.

The community voted on the areas of focus for 2025 at the community meetup for the LocalGov Drupal roadmap, held on 31 January. 

Some work has already been done to understand the common problems faced by people who are using images and we can lean on our experience from leading the media track for Drupal CMS and through our day-to-day experience so I feel it is an area where we can make a valuable contribution.

To narrow down the scope we will focus initially on the most commonly used features and the experience that editors have when their sites have been configured without much customisation. Some of the problems people are facing include difficulty adding images to pages, using images in a letterbox format and optimising image file size.

A screenshot from a video Tony took to show how an image can be edited in Drupal CMS.

There are various ways that we can approach some of these challenges. We can look to improve features out of the box, provide options where councils may wish to make choices about how their features work, and we can provide guidance and add documentation. 

Once solutions to these common problems are proposed, we plan to explore this further with councils and development teams, who may have other ideas for improvements to LocalGov Drupal. 

Conclusion 

There is always a lot of work going on behind the scenes of the LocalGov Drupal project. 

We are proud to be a part of this project and to make contributions large and small to help councils better serve their communities with outstanding websites that help people find the information they’re looking for quickly and to access more services online.