Content designers, editors & content managers

This section is specifically to help content designers, content managers and editors to get up and running with a LocalGov Drupal site.

We've consulted content designers and site editors along the way as we've designed features, so we hope that once you've got up and running that you'll find it easy and intuitive.

The following pages explain how the features work out-of-the-box, from a content designer or editor point of view. We recommend that you copy and extend them with your own in-house styles to make a full styleguide.

Content Design / Editor Starter Pack

There is a starter pack which you can download here (opens new window) use a reference guide to basic tasks.

Video series

We've put together a series of How-to videos which are here in the documentation or can be seen on the LocalGov Drupal YouTube channel (opens new window).

Features

Descriptions of the features of LocalGov Drupal (opens new window) that are useful for content editors and content designers, with guidance on what the feature is designed for, and how it was intended to be used.

Patterns & Components

Descriptions of some components available through the WYSIWYG editor (opens new window)

Content Migration

How best to migrate content from another CMS is one of the most asked questions. To help get you started there is a series of videos on how some councils have managed this here on our YouTube channel (opens new window) but we suggest talking to other councils in the #group-content Slack channel, or to some of the suppliers who have helped with migrations.

Drupal terminology

If you are not familiar with Drupal CMS, here as are some of the most common terms explained.

Content types: content types are one of the main building blocks within a Drupal site; as the name suggests, content types hold content. However, different content types can hold different kinds of content; an event can hold information that is specific to a time, where a discussion can be used for people to talk. Most sites have multiple different content types.

Node: within Drupal, a node is a piece of content. All data stored via a content type is a node.

Taxonomy: The process of classifying content.

Vocabulary: A group of taxonomy terms to choose from when classifying content in a particular way, such as the list of all of the vendor categories on a farmers market site.

Taxonomy term: A term used to classify content, such as a tag or a category. See also Vocabulary.

Menus: collections of links; these links can be displayed as a list, as drop-down items, with graphics, etc, depending on how they are styled by the theme.

Entity: an entity is a piece of data within a Drupal site. Nodes, users, comments, and taxonomy are all entities; additionally, with custom code you can create new entity types if/when needed. You can also add fields to entities, which allows for things like detailed user profiles, or more sophisticated comment forms.

Fields: fields are used to store and display structured information. For example, on a user profile, you would want to create a "First" and "Last" name field to store normalized data; or, you would break an address down into individual fields to store the components of an address. There are also different types of fields; for example, things as varied as email addresses and pictures can be stored within fields, and this allows us to make some assumptions about the information stored in the field.

Role: A named set of permissions that can be applied to a user account.

Permission: The ability to perform some action on the site, such as editing a particular type of content, or viewing user profiles.

User: A person interacting with the site, either logged-in or anonymous.

See Drupal's glossary (opens new window) for more.

How to get involved

Working Groups

We're keen to have content designers represented in the design and specification of new features. Please get in touch if you want to be involved.

Slack channels

Email hello@localgovdrupal.org if you'd like to join the LocalGov Drupal Slack community.

There's a channel for #content and occassional meetups of content designers. These are really good places to get help, share learnings or request new features.

Report bugs and issues

We encourage people to report bugs and issues in the Git repo - see the how-to guide (opens new window)