East Suffolk LocalGov Drupal

East Suffolk initially contacted us in December 2022 to move their main, gov.uk website over to Drupal (or LocalGov Drupal).
They were very much beginners to the Drupal world and interested in trialling the platform, exploring what a managed hosting service could offer and to any other guidance we could offer.

We then built LGD’s infrastructure on AWS for testing. Once it was in place, their team had time to learn and work with it, and they commissioned training sessions alongside ad hoc development sprints—primarily front-end work—to customise the site to their needs.
 

Training 

We provided the East Suffolk team with some screen share training days on Core Drupal workflows including module installation and updates; GitLab usage for version control, code management, and CI pipelines; theming and styling fundamentals (CSS, layouts, and base theme overrides); content modelling with content types, taxonomy, and vocabularies; editorial workflows and permissions with granular access control; subsite architecture and its impact on search and navigation; geospatial content using Geofield with ArcGIS integration; and task-based “how do I?” problem-solving to address functional gaps and custom development needs.
East Suffolk wanted also some further training Drupal Development Workflow. We introduced the core components of a Drupal development workflow, including:

• Composer – managing Drupal core, contributed modules, and dependencies
• Patches – applying and managing patches for contributed modules
• Configuration Management – exporting, importing, and syncing configuration
• Git – version control best practices for Drupal projects

Front-End Development in Drupal, we covered front-end concepts and customization, including:

• Themes – understanding Drupal theming and theme structure
• Templates – working with Twig templates to control markup
• Preprocessing – using preprocess functions to pass data to templates
• Image Styles – configuring and using image styles for responsive images

Module Installation and Configuration, we assisted with installing and configuring several contributed modules, including:

• Google Analytics https://www.drupal.org/project/google_analytics
• Google Tag https://www.drupal.org/project/google_tag
• Security Kit (SecKit) https://www.drupal.org/project/seckit
• Two-Factor Authentication (TFA) https://www.drupal.org/project/tfa

We also provided useful links to tutorials and learning resources to help deepen understanding of Drupal concepts and best practices.
 

Development

Additionally to the training, they have a support contract with us and add development tickets to support adhoc changes to customise their platform, mostly front end tasks on navigation, blocks, homepage, webform.

East Suffolk were happy with the LocalGov Drupal site that we set up for them, but they did want to put their own mark on it so that it stood out from the other Drupal and LocalGov Drupal sites on the internet. To that end we added custom elements to the site, including a custom footer with artwork created by East Suffolk, custom colours that fit the East Suffolk branding guidelines and many other custom elements.

LocalGov Drupal makes use of the Paragraphs module to inject small blocks of content into pages. A number of custom Paragraphs were created for the project, which included custom styles for the content they produced. We made use of the Single Directory Component system to create the templates for this content, which allows for more control over the markup and means that the styles and scripts associated with the content are collected together.

A new section called “Have your say” was created by East Suffolk with the purpose of segmenting out certain types of news stories that deal with community feedback. The work completed here was a collaboration of efforts between East Suffolk and Code Enigma. East Suffolk created the content type and fields they needed and Code Enigma created custom templates for the page, the section of the site (with faceted search) and a number of other best practices for content types in a Drupal site.

The LocalGov Publications module was used to allow PDF documents to be added to the site in HTML form, which is a much more accessible and user-friendly way of displaying the information in PDF documents. To assist in this process the LocalGov Publications Importer module was added to the site so that PDF documents could be imported automatically. This allowed East Suffolk to process more PDF documents without having to copy and paste one page at a time. Whilst the import process worked we found a small bug in the permissions of the importer module and were able to contribute a fix back to the module maintainers.

East Suffolk needed more control over the way that media and files are controlled in Drupal. LocalGov Drupal uses default Drupal configuration to handle file uploads, where existing files are always kept in place and new files are uploaded with different names to avoid overwriting them. Code Enigma assisted here by installing and configuring a selection of modules that allowed files to be deleted or replaced via the CMS.

Benefits

The LocalGov Drupal approach allowed them to avoid starting from zero and instead build on a solid foundation. They had the time and space to create something that truly suited their needs, while gradually taking full control of the platform through a structured learning period. With the support we provided—hands-on development sprints whenever they had accumulated a wishlist, detailed testing tickets with clear testing steps as documentation, and live screenshare training sessions—they were empowered to learn confidently, make informed decisions, and ultimately own the solution they built. They are now live https://www.eastsuffolk.gov.uk/ and own the build of their site!

Their 3 environments Live, Dev and Stage, completely managed by our dedicated team of systems administrators and CloudOps experts, with backups, monitoring, alerting, user management, network security. Coupled with regular Drupal updates—including core, base themes, and supported modules—we ensure the site remains secure, up to date, and performing at its best.