Drupal Best Practices for Government

Drupal is a customizable open-source content management system that allows you to easily organize, manage, and publish your content. Hundreds of organizations and government agencies all over the world use Drupal. See a list of U.S. Government sites built with Drupal.

Benefits include:

• Adoption by many government organizations, creating opportunities to collaboratively develop and share Drupal enhancements across government
• Built-in support for RDFa, which is a key component of open data
• Ability to manage thousands of Web pages
• A community that is fun, welcoming, challenging and fair
• Segmented roles and responsibilities for editing, reviewing, publishing, archiving content
• Easy application of policy or other changes across the entire site
• Support for, and integration with, social tools
• Cross-agency innovation and sharing via Drupal4Gov community
• Reduced internal costs of HTML coding and programming, by taking advantage of Drupal community to solve problems and code solutions
• Lower the bar for technical Web content tasks, empower teams to learn and share new skills

Specific Policy or Legal Requirements

• Digital Government Strategy (May 2012)—helps agencies meeting requirements around Open Content and Shared Services

How to Implement

Drupal Core provides the basic building blocks to create a website. To make the site your own, you’ll also need to install and configure modules that provide additional features and functionality. You can also install themes to customize the look and feel of your site.

Get started with Drupal by downloading the software and configuring it to meet your needs. Note that you’ll need admin access to your workstation, and the technical knowledge to perform the installation and configuration. Web staff should coordinate with IT to gain the necessary systems access. Also review the Drupal Licensing FAQ to learn about licensing.

Custom Implementation

Start from scratch and select modules to meet your specific needs

• Start with Drupal Core—the official release comes bundled with a variety of modules and themes to get you started
• Add a mix of Drupal modules and themes, and custom code as needed, to get your site working the way you want

Distribution Implementation

Install a set of modules that are already bundled together and configured to work “out of the box”. Examples include:

• OpenPublic
• Open Academy

Cloud-Based Implementation

Create and host your site in the cloud

• Drupal Gardens—create a free account, then create your site. You can download or install elsewhere later, if needed; may be the quickest way to get started with Drupal
• Pantheon—another hosting solution
• Co-host your site on another agency’s Drupal configuration

Drupal is supported by an active Drupal developer community, and you can get lots of help there, but since so much of Drupal is customizable, you’ll likely need someone on your team with Drupal skills who can support your Drupal implementation over the long term.

Examples

Federal agencies/sites that are built with Drupal include:

• whitehouse.gov—The White House
• fcc.gov—Federal Communications Commission
• energy.gov—Department of Energy
• HowTo.gov—General Services Administration

Resources

• Drupal4Gov group—community of government Drupal developers and advocates
• Drupal Community—connect with other Drupal users via groups, events, chats, forums, and more
• Drupal Distributions—“plug and play” set of Drupal modules already configured for specific types of websites
• Learn more about content management systems

Content Lead: Rachel Flagg
Page Reviewed/Updated: November 23, 2012