LocalGov Drupal: 2024 was a bumper year and we're expecting more in 2025
A lot has happened in the LocalGov Drupal world this year. More council websites were launched, the number of published microsites surpassed 30 and many new features were added.
The number of councils who have joined the LocalGov Drupal family shot up to 53 in 2024, and there was a significant uptick in the number of microsites that were published. A lot of work was done in the all-important areas of accessibility, editor experience and microsites, and the community contributed many new features to the platform.
One of the highlights of the year was LocalGov Drupal Week 2024, which took place in November. It was a week filled with excellent virtual sessions that allowed councils and suppliers to share their experiences and learn from each other.
It also gave us a great snapshot of how far this product has come in 2024 and what we can look forward to in 2025.
A look back at 2024’s achievements
One of the most popular workshops, led by LocalGov Drupal Product Lead Will Callaghan, assessed whether the missions for LocalGov Drupal for 2024 had been achieved. These included accessibility, microsites and quality-of-life improvements.
Editor experience
The mission for 2024 was to make content publishing powerful, flexible and easy. A lot has been done over the year, including many quality of life improvements for content editors.
These quality of life improvements include ditching Drupalisms (terms that are pertinent only to Drupal) to make it easier to understand and work with LocalGov Drupal for the first time.
Some other improvements to the editor experience are:
- The ability to give colleagues from various departments access to service pages so they can edit them.
- The Gin admin theme was added, giving editors a more enjoyable user experience.
- Masquerade functionality – a nifty addition that allows editors to act as another user to test the functionality and content as they see it - particularly useful when debugging!
- Preview link for multiple pages. This was a massive bugbear but now that it’s been solved it allows editors to send a link to multiple people to preview the page or pages that have been created before they are published.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.2 compliance is crucial to public sector websites and because LocalGov Drupal bakes it into any work undertaken, new features are compliant from the beginning rather than retrospectively.
There is a monthly drop-in for accessibility for the community, so any questions can be answered and any issues can be addressed.
2024 also saw an audit of LocalGov Drupal and the fixing of any issues. This will be repeated on LocalGov Microsites, and outstanding issues will be addressed.
Microsites
The LGD Microsites platform provides a flexible, scalable way to manage your organisation’s web estate. This year saw a stable release of microsites, and more than 33 microsites have been published to date, with more in the works!
Additions that are en route include:
- The accessibility audit mentioned above
- A live preview so editors can see the effect of design changes as they make them. A beta version has been released
- The Mercury editor for effortless drag-and-drop publishing
- More flexible permissions for each microsite
- Countless small quality-of-life improvements.
Features funded by the community
Some additions to LocalGov Drupal include:
- Elections (versions 2 and 3) that were used in the UK general election that allow users to create wards and publish general election results
- Content access by path, which allows admins to devolve content creation to other teams
- Publications - Reduce PDFs and increase accessibility with this new long form content type
- Media entity usage, which shows where media items are being used on a site
- Subsite extras: now subsites are more flexible, and include a menu and any content type within a subsite.
What we can look forward to in 2025
In his LocalGov Drupal Week session, LGD Tech Lead Finn Lewis looked ahead to key focus areas for 2025. He also shared some inspiration from developments in the wider Drupal community and how they might benefit LocalGov Drupal too.
Microsites
There were some major developments to the Microsites platform in 2024, and Microsites are still a key focus for 2025.
Fundamentally the Microsites mission this year was to get it to a stable release. There are currently 33 plus microsites out in the wild – which is great and growing rapidly now that it's stable.
This includes Essex County Council’s waste management microsite, Love Essex, which Annertech’s Anthony Lindsay presented on during LocalGov Drupal Week 2024.
Here are some upcoming additions to this fast-growing platform:
Mercury editor
The Mercury editor will allow content editors to edit content but in the front end rather than in the back end. The Mercury editor, which replaces the Drupal default editor page, will give users the potential to add sections or edit pieces of content directly and users can see how the changes are going to have effect in a much quicker way. The ability to edit on the frontend will change the lives of content editors who are managing microsites.
Live preview
The standard way of editing the site design at the moment is to go to your microsite administration area as an admin user, and click on the site design link where you can control your colours and fonts etc. In order to see those changes you need to save and then go back to the site to see the changes.
The live preview module will expose the same bits of functionality in the frontend, so all the fields will be in the sidebar and will make life easier for content editors.
Accessibility
Sa11y is an accessibility quality assurance tool that visually highlights common accessibility and usability issues. This will work alongside the Color Picker, so users are able to ensure that the colour contrast throughout the website is accessible.
Other additions
Other possibilities for Microsites in 2025 include more flexible roles and permissions when it comes to events and directories, more sophistication around access control (private content as well as public content) and finders (currently known as directories).
Developments to keep an eye on
Artificial Intelligence
As Drupal moves to adopt responsible AI, LocalGov Drupal is also weighing up the potential advantages of using AI in a responsible way.
Drupal has harnessed the power of Chat GPT in the editor, and it can be used to summarise copy or potentially generate alt text for images, and more integrations with the AI modules are being explored.
The potential for LocalGov Drupal could be in areas such as content design work – to make that more efficient, quicker and richer. Or to help call centre agents to find information quickly. There is even the possibility of swappable language models and training up language models for specific subjects or sectors.
Drupal CMS
This is a Drupal installation that's launching in January 2025, that’s a low-code website solution for marketers and content editors, to allow them to utilise the power of Drupal even without any development knowledge. It will allow users to choose from various “recipes” and create a site quickly using these prepackaged templates.
It's worth keeping an eye on Drupal CMS’s progress and seeing how parts of it could potentially be incorporated into LocalGov Drupal.
Conclusion
The LocalGov Drupal ecosystem is continually evolving, and the latest updates bring a host of exciting new features and improvements designed to make building local government websites faster, more flexible, and more accessible.
With enhanced tools for content management, better customisation options, and an increased focus on user experience, LocalGov Drupal continues to be a powerful platform for creating websites that meet the specific needs of local councils and communities.
These changes are designed to make it easier to manage content, streamline workflows, and ensure that local government services are accessible to all. They improve the functionality of council websites and also help councils to deliver better, more responsive services to their communities.
We can't wait to see the progress that is made in 2025.
Want to know how LocalGov Drupal can work for you?
Annertech are proud supporters of the LocalGov Drupal project and we’ve been involved since its first inception. If you’d like to put our expertise to good use, get in touch.
Mike King Director of Delivery
Mike is Annertech's Director of Delivery, among other things. He joined Annertech in 2013, and has more than 25 years' experience in technical project management and consulting.
