So I'd like to keep the admin UI as clean as possible for clients, and since they only use one text format at the moment, all filter guidelines and tips are cluttering the Drupal administration interface too much. So in previous Drupal versions there where modules to fix this, but for 10 not (yet) available.
Also, I'd like to keep overhead to a minimum and 'every module counts', so here is a simple solution.
Also mighty handy for all kinds of additional Drupal administration theme tweaks and optimizations!
Here's the code:
For those who celebrate, we hope you had a wonderful holiday weekend.
Below are dates to note and read about leading up to MidCamp at the end of this month. We look forward to seeing you!
As always, we are very excited about our line up. All sessions on April 26th and April 27th are included in the price of your registration. Get ready for learning, fun, and reconnecting!
Here are more specifics:
We're taking MidCamp to the friendly confines for Padres @ Cubs. The game begins at 6:40pm. We're asking attendees to buy a ticket through ti.to so that we can have an accurate count of attendees. Your ticket price will be refunded as concessions voucher once you claim your baseball ticket in person.
If you've already got a MidCamp ticket, please go back and add on a ticket to the game. Camp registration is required to attend this event.
More details to come!
Want to give back to the Drupal Community without writing a line of code? Volunteer to help out at MidCamp. We’re looking for amazing people to help with all kinds of tasks throughout the event.
We still have sponsorship opportunities available. Here are the basics:
Core Sponsor — $4,000
Supporting Sponsor — $1,500
Community Sponsor — $600
Wouldn’t it be great to have your logo here?
Join the MidCamp Slack and come hang out with the community online. We will be making announcements there from time to time. We’re also on Twitter and Mastodon.
We can’t wait to see you soon! Don’t forget, cancel all those other plans and make MidCamp the only thing happening on your calendar from April 26-28, 2023.
Have you saved the date yet? The beautiful city of Pittsburgh, PA, will host the next DrupaCon North America from 5th through 8th June 2023. I know it feels like just yesterday that DrupalCon North America 2022 zipped by, and we’re already talking about DrupalCon 2023!
Famously known as the “Steel City” (the largest steel-producing city in the world) and “City of Bridges” (a staggering 446 bridges!), Pittsburgh is one of the top most liveable cities in the United States. When you’re here, you will be surrounded by warm and kind Pittsburghers (as they like to call themselves), world-class breweries and distilleries, green spaces, and some gorgeous views. Need more reasons to visit Pittsburgh?
Explore the marvels of art, natural history, and science at the world-renowned Carnegie museums. Featuring four dynamic and diverse museums, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Science Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie museum has something to appeal to everyone. While you’re here, don’t miss checking out the first fossil of the Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur on display, the PaleoLab, where paleontologists prepare specimen for display, contemporary American and European artwork at the Hall of Sculptures and the Scaife gallery, and their constant changing art and science exhibitions. You can find more information about visiting the museum here.
If you enjoy the beauty and serenity of nature and the green outdoors, Phipps conservatory is the perfect place to visit. While it opened its doors to the public way back in 1890, its greenhouse production facility is a fantastic example of cutting-edge and sustainable innovation. It is the first to receive the Platinum LEED certification, a globally recognized symbol of sustainability achievement. When you’re here, you can stroll around the enchanting outdoor garden, check out the impressive glasshouses, explore the Tropical forest conservatory, and learn about their green innovation initiatives at the Center for sustainable landscapes. Before you plan your trip, visit their website to find out more about their immersive rotating exhibitions for that month.
Take a ride back in time and explore one of Pittsburgh’s best panoramic views from a funicular railway (incline) experience. The Duquesne incline glides 400 feet above Pittsburgh’s rivers (the Ohio, Monongahela, and Allegheny) and is the only other remaining funicular in the country. While on the ride, you will climb (or descend) the hillside of Mount Washington. At the top station of the incline, you can explore the Observation deck and also dig deeper into its history and operation. The great part about the experience is that there’s a ride every 5 minutes, which means no waiting! No pre-booking is needed, but make sure you have the exact change for the quick ride.
Want to ‘ketchup’ on the history of Pittsburgh? Then you must visit the Senator John Heinz History Center located in the Strip District. It has something for every history buff, be it about the first settlers of Pittsburgh, the revolutionary war, the industrial revolution, sports, pop culture, and much more. It highlights the contributions of Pittsburgh’s locals to mankind, like the first polio vaccine, the Ferris wheel, revolutionary public TV broadcasting, and also the Big Mac! One of the most interesting attractions (and obviously) is the Heinz exhibit that displays everything you wanted to know about how they started way back in the 1900s to where they are today. Go plan your visit!
It would probably be a sin to miss a river cruise when you're in the city of rivers and bridges. Especially when it gives you a unique, historical experience of the rich heritage of southwestern Pennsylvania. The Uniquely Pittsburgh sightseeing tour by the Rivers of Steel offers an informative tour to enlighten tourists about the past and present of the beautiful city. You can also find various vantage points for the best views and to click amazing photographs with a backdrop of Pittsburgh. Find out more about this 90-minute river tour here.
And that’s not all! There’s so much more to explore in the ‘Burgh while you’re here for DrupalCon North 2023. As spring transitions into summer, June is one of the best months to visit Pittsburgh, with many interesting outdoor events taking place around the city.
But don’t take our word for it. Our Drupal Pittsburgh Local Ambassador, Bill Renk, “Pittsburgh is the perfect fit for DrupalCon because Pittsburgh not only embraces Drupal, as seen by Drupal's adoption by its two major universities (Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh), but Pittsburgh is a reflection of the Drupal community itself – friendly, welcoming and hard-working!”
Government websites have come a long way since the Clinton administration in the US launched the White House website July 1994—one of the first of its kind on the web in July 1994. Today’s government websites have to do it all for everyone within their jurisdiction, whether that’s a small town of 5,000 people or an entire country. They’re expected to serve as appealing digital front doors, offer a wide range of online services with the utmost efficiency, and provide an inclusive and accessible experience for all—as we saw in our recent blog post on the best government websites of 2023.
Governments are also expected to be responsible with the taxpayer dollars they spend on building and maintaining these websites. When a Government of Canada web overhaul ran over-budget by over $7 million in 2016, the media had a field day with the story.
It’s little surprise that many government websites struggle to keep up with the tall orders placed upon them. A whopping 80% of US federal agencies ranked “poor” or “very poor” compared with just 14% of private sector brands, according to Forrester’s 2019 US Federal Customer Experience Index. While COVID-19 helped accelerate the move towards e-government, the public sector still has a lot of catching up to do.
Creating an optimal website for a municipality, region, or federal department means checking off a lot of boxes. Key priorities include:
When it comes to government websites, Drupal is everywhere. As of 2021, roughly 56% of the world’s government websites used it. Several countries—including Australia, Estonia, France, Germany, India, and South Africa—house their central government portals on Drupal, while nearly every other national government uses it for at least some agencies. Whitehouse.gov famously lived on Drupal from 2009 to 2017, an early move by the Obama administration aimed at showing transparency.
Some of the other major jurisdictions on Drupal include London, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Buenos Aires, New York State, New South Wales, Western Australia, and Northern Ireland to name a few.
Among international bodies, 78 out of a total of 117 organizations within the United Nations and World Bank used Drupal as of November 2022, including un.org itself and the International Criminal Court.
Some 25% of all government websites in Canada now live on Drupal. These include the:
There are many reasons for Drupal’s outsized presence globally among government websites. Here are a few of them.
There are clear cost advantages to opting for an open-source CMS like Drupal versus a proprietary one, as highlighted by the Government of Canada’s expensive misadventure with Adobe Corp. While Drupal sites aren’t free to build, the costs are much easier to manage due to the lack of licence fees associated with the platform. This is especially true when expanded across dozens, if not hundreds, of government departments.
Drupal also makes cost management easier after the sites have been built. Prior to their consolidation under Canada.ca, the Government of Canada maintained a fleet of unique websites on different CMSs, making for complex and costly maintenance and upgrades. By contrast, Drupal makes it easy for government departments to share existing customizable website code and replicate designs, features, and functionality.
Furthermore, as an open-source platform, Drupal makes it relatively easy for organizations to migrate their sites to a different platform (in the unlikely event they want to!). This isn’t the case with proprietary platforms, whose customers have the choice of either sticking with the provider or starting again from scratch—as proved to be the case with Canada.ca and Adobe.
From a taxpayer accountability standpoint, the choice is clear—open source is the way to go.
How important is performance optimization? For high-traffic websites like many government sites are, immensely. In 2018 the BBC found it was losing some 10% of its audience for every extra second it took their site to load. For government websites, delays in loading mean frustrated constituents at best, and at worst can jeopardize the relaying of vital information.
Government websites may not be high traffic all the time, but they need to be ready to manage massive spikes in traffic.
Even small municipalities should have the digital capabilities to respond to an unexpected crisis—as we explained in our recent blog: Surviving Snowmageddon: Is Your Comms Strategy Emergency-Ready?
When it comes to performance under pressure, Drupal significantly outperforms other open source platforms such as WordPress. Drupal was created from the very beginning to be highly efficient and capable of managing heavy traffic loads. Drupal also has built-in caching and file aggregation mechanisms that allow site managers to speed up page loading time and save the data transfer.
There’s no truth to the widely held belief that proprietary websites are more secure than open-source ones, as we discussed in our recent open source myth-busting blog post. While open-source code is available to anyone, including bad actors, Drupal has a veritable army of contributors working behind the scenes to identify and patch up weaknesses in the platform’s armour.
Drupal’s popularity among government agencies attests to its peerless security. Drupal beats WordPress in its handling of complex security situations such as PCI compliance, which requires database encryption, while WordPress’ greater reliance on third-party extensions makes it more vulnerable. There’s also the simple fact that there are far more WordPress sites out there than Drupal sites, which means WordPress gets targeted more frequently than Drupal. Of course, it’s worth remembering that any CMS is a sitting duck when not properly updated.
A further advantage of Drupal for governments is its handling of sensitive data. WordPress is notably vulnerable in this area. It stores files in the /wp-content/uploads/[YEAR]/[MONTH] directory, meaning it’s fairly straightforward for someone with basic knowledge of WordPress (and a bit of luck) to gain unauthorized access to files. Drupal is much more secure in this regard: it only grants access to these types of files if the user has appropriate permissions.
According to a recent analysis, WordPress accounts for nearly three quarters (74%) of all hacked websites, while representing around 64% of the web. Drupal, by contrast, represents around 2% of all cyber attacks. Considering its share of over 10% of the top 10,000 sites, those are pretty good odds.
Another important need for government websites is an ability to adapt and expand alongside government services. Your site must be both flexible and scalable, whether you’re introducing a new bus pass system, rolling out pandemic protocols, amalgamating with a neighbouring municipality, or adding services in a new language.
The open-source model of Drupal means you’re never really stuck with what you’ve got. Its vast community of developers contributes to an ever-expanding library of plug-and-play-ready modules—nearly 50,000 as of mid-February 2023—meaning there’s very little Drupal can’t do. Meanwhile, the lack of licensing fees makes expanding your site significantly less costly than it would be on a proprietary platform.
Drupal is overall a more flexible platform than WordPress and thus a better option for deep customization. It offers a flexible and extensive taxonomy system that makes it better suited to handling large volumes of content. And it has built-in multi-language support—a must for many jurisdictions. Drupal is also more flexible than WordPress on the back end. With advanced user permissions for unlimited roles, it’s better suited to marketing and IT teams whose numbers are liable to expand.
Government services and personnel are forever adapting with the times, and you need a CMS that is similarly adaptable. Drupal is that CMS.
One of the inherent strengths of open source platforms like Drupal is their ongoing commitment to inclusivity and the diversity of their contributing communities. This has made open source platforms the major driving force behind web accessibility.
Proprietary vendors will get you to bare minimum level of accessibility—WCAG 2.0 AA for most government websites. But anything beyond that in terms of customization for web accessibility will quickly get very expensive. By contrast, Drupal is constantly introducing new accessible components that teams can easily use to expand their sites while ensuring accessibility throughout.
While Drupal isn’t inherently more accessible than any other platform, its customizability and the sheer volume of its contributed accessible modules make it the logical choice for governments.
Governments have been slower to embrace digital personalization than the private sector, but some have made noteworthy advances in this area. Personalization enables governments to foster 1:1 online relationships with citizens. And it helps site visitors navigate the enormous volume of information typically housed on government websites by promoting content that’s relevant to individual users.
When it comes to personalization, Drupal leaves all other open-source platforms in the dust. Its capacity for deep customization includes a range of built-in and contributed personalization modules. Meanwhile, its close partners at Acquia offer a cloud-based, Drupal-optimized personalization platform that provides state-of-the-art personalization across multiple channels.
If you’re a Canadian federal government agency—or simply want your website to have the look and feel of the Government of Canada—Drupal has you covered. The Web Experience Toolkit (WxT) is a version of Drupal tailored for the Canada.ca design system as well as other government sites, covering similar requirements regarding accessibility, usability, interoperability, and bilingualism.
For more information on how to install WxT and its many features, read our recent blog post on the subject.
We’re experts in applying open source power and flexibility to the dynamic needs of a Government’s website.
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