Photo: Illek Petr, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A network for the people who build public services on Drupal
GDDN brings together developers, designers, content people and suppliers working with Drupal in councils, government and the wider public sector. Ask questions, share code and meet people who have already solved the problem in front of you.
Join the communityThree ways in
Ask the network
Stuck on a migration, an accessibility fix or a procurement question? Someone here has been there.
Start a discussion
Share what you’ve built
Put your module, component or case study where other councils will find it and reuse it.
Show your work
Come to an event
Meetups, clinics and sprints, online and in person, run by members for members.
See what's on
What the network does
Built around the work, not around a feed
Everything in GDDN exists because someone needed it on a real project. These are the parts members use every week.
Discussions
Ask the people who’ve done it before
The forum is where most of the help happens. Ask how another council handled its Drupal 7 exit, compare notes on a LocalGov Drupal upgrade, or get a second pair of eyes on a stubborn WCAG 2.2 failure.
Threads are visible to members only, so people talk plainly about what worked and what didn’t.
Working groups
Small groups for problems that need more than a thread
Working groups bring together people with a shared problem for a few months at a time: content design on LocalGov sites, accessibility testing, site search, migrations. Each group keeps its own notes and decisions, and writes up what it learns for everyone else.
Shared project pipeline
Build it once, use it in many places
Propose a module, component or fix, find the other organisations who need the same thing, and split the work. The pipeline follows each idea from proposal to release, so nobody quietly builds the same feature twice.
Module radar
Which modules are people trusting in production?
Members rate the contrib modules they actually run: adopt, trial, hold or avoid, with a line on why. Check it before a module ends up in your composer.json.
Mentoring
Learn from someone a few steps ahead
Mentoring pairs people who are new to Drupal, or new to the public sector, with members who have been doing it for years. It might be an hour a fortnight or a single conversation before a big decision. Mentors volunteer, and nobody is selling anything.
Events
Meetups, clinics and sprints
Regional meetups, online show-and-tells, accessibility clinics and upgrade sprints. Members run them, and we keep them small enough that you can actually talk to people.
Coming up
Show and tell Online
Show and tell: October
- When
- , 12:30pm to 1:30pm
- Where
- Online, link sent when you RSVP
Four teams, ten minutes each: real work from public sector Drupal sites, shown warts and all.
Clinic Online
Accessibility clinic
- When
- , 2pm to 4pm
- Where
- Online, link sent when you RSVP
Bring a page, a component or a nagging doubt. Two hours of hands-on help from the accessibility working group.
Sprint In person
Drupal 11 upgrade sprint
- When
- , 9:30am to 5pm
- Where
- Library of Birmingham, Birmingham
A day of heads-down upgrading with people who have done it before. Bring your site, leave with a plan or a finished upgrade.
Latest from the network
Leaving Drupal 7: what three councils learned moving 40,000 pages
Drupal 7 support has ended, and the last few councils on it are mid-move. Three teams told us what they would do differently, from content audits to redirect maps.
LocalGov Drupal: what changed this quarter
Drupal 11 support across the distribution, a tidier events search, and better defaults in the base theme. Here is what matters if you run a LocalGov Drupal site.
Six things our WCAG 2.2 audits keep finding
After a year of peer audits across member sites, the same issues come up again and again. Most are quick to fix once you know where to look.
There’s a seat for you
Membership is free for anyone working with Drupal in or for the public sector: council and government staff, agency developers, freelancers and students. A person reads every application.
Join the community