Guest Josh Miller from Urban Institute discusses their Drupal usage, challenges with AI bots, technical hosting solutions, and nonprofit innovations. They explore Access Unpublished module, local development tools, and Drupal GovCon. Urban Institute focuses on data visualization and interactive experiences.
Drupal offers flexibility for custom content types and web components at Urban Institute.
Urban Institute leverages Docker technology for efficient local development across varied setups.
Urban Institute faces challenges aligning Drupal capabilities with content team needs amidst limited resources.
Deep dives
Drupal's Importance to Urban Institute
Urban Institute values Drupal for its flexibility in allowing custom content types, Layout Builder integration, and utilization of web components. The platform's rich resources and active community support align with Urban Institute's mission to seek insights that drive social and economic impact. Drupal's cost-effectiveness and absence of licensing fees make it an ideal choice for the nonprofit organization's diverse needs despite funding challenges.
Data Visualization and the API Integration
Urban Institute is working on an interactive dashboard for its upward mobility project, leveraging a custom API in Drupal to manage content and serve JSON responses. The dashboard integrates data visualization created by an external agency, allowing Drupal's flexibility to control visualization elements, rendering, and multilingual support. This innovative approach employs web components, content management control, and translation capabilities to enhance the user experience.
Local Development Environment Diversity
Despite managing multiple websites with different local setups, Urban Institute benefits from Docker technology, enhancing local development speed and efficiency. The organization's varied local environments include Lando, DDev, and Docsol, reflecting the adaptability needed for diverse project requirements, hosting integrations, and team preferences.
Challenges Faced by Nonprofit Organizations Using Drupal
Urban Institute encounters logistical complexities in ensuring the alignment of Drupal capabilities with the needs of its content production team. Balancing resource prioritization and stakeholder objectives while enhancing the user experience presents a recurring challenge. The nonprofit navigates Drupal's dynamic landscape, managing dreams and expectations within limited budget constraints.
Future Launch of Interactive Dashboard Feature
Urban Institute anticipates the release of its interactive dashboard feature within the year, introducing a transformative data visualization experience empowered by Drupal's controllable API and rendering capabilities. The multilingual-friendly dashboard enables seamless content management and translation adjustments, enhancing accessibility and usability for diverse audiences.
Today we are talking about Urban Institute, What they do, and How they use Drupal with guest Josh Miller. We’ll also cover Access Unpublished as our module of the week.
How old: created in Feb 2011 by aberg, though recent releases are by Christian Fritsch (chr.fritsch) of Thunder
Versions available: 8.x-1.5
Maintainership
Security coverage
Test coverage
Number of open issues: 58 open issues, 17 of which are bugs against the current branch
Usage stats:
8,638 sites
Module features and usage
Once installed, this module adds a new element to your unpublished entity forms, for generating links with a special hash value. When generating the link, you can choose how long the hash value can be used for access.
Within that form section, you can copy the access URL for any of your generated tokens, and then paste into an email or some kind of direct message.
You will need to set a permission for users to access content using the special access URLs, so if you want anyone with the URL to be allowed access, you’ll need to assign that permission to the Anonymous user role
The access lifetime can be anything from 1 day to unlimited (never expires), and you can set the default value in the settings form. That form also allows you to set the URL parameter that will be used for access, gives you options to modify the HTTP headers on the unpublished page, and has a check box you can use to delete all expired tokens.
Expired tokens will be deleted on cron run, and when you delete an entity any related tokens are also removed.
This use case of allowing review of unpublished content for people who aren’t users in the Drupal site is a request I hear on a regular (if infrequent) basis, so I’ve personally found this module really useful.
