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LocalGov Drupal Walkthrough

Step-by-step guide to exploring your deployed LocalGov Drupal CMS with AI features

Explore LocalGov Drupal with AI

40 minutes to explore a modern council CMS

Deploy once via NDX:Try (35 to 40 minutes), then explore at your own pace with this step-by-step guide.
No technical knowledge required

This walkthrough guides you step-by-step through logging in, exploring content, and editing pages. Perfect for service managers, content editors, and anyone evaluating LocalGov Drupal for their council.

What you'll do

In this 40 minutes walkthrough, you'll:

  1. Logged in to Drupal - Get your credentials and access the admin dashboard (3 minutes)
  2. Homepage explored - Understand LocalGov Drupal's structure and navigation (3 minutes)
  3. Council generation understood - Learn how AI creates unique fictional councils (6 minutes)
  4. Content edited - Make changes to a sample service page (4 minutes)
  5. AI content generated - Generate draft content from prompts (5 minutes)
  6. Content simplified - Simplify text to plain English with one click (4 minutes)
  7. Auto alt-text generated - See AI generate accessible image descriptions automatically (3 minutes)
  8. PDF converted to web - Convert legacy PDFs to accessible web content (4 minutes)
  9. DEMO banner understood - Learn why it's there and what it means (2 minutes)
  10. Listen to Page explored - Try the text-to-speech accessibility feature (3 minutes)
  11. Translate this Page explored - Try the content translation accessibility feature (3 minutes)
  12. Cleanup prepared - Know how to delete your stack when finished (3 minutes)

Before you start

Important You must have already requested the LocalGov Drupal scenario via NDX:Try.

Deploy the LocalGov Drupal scenario if you haven't already.

Important Deployment takes 35 to 40 minutes. This is longer than other scenarios because it provisions a full Aurora Serverless database.
Why does deployment take this long?

LocalGov Drupal provisions enterprise-grade infrastructure:

  • Aurora Serverless database – created on-demand for your session
  • EFS file system – shared storage for Drupal files
  • Fargate containers – serverless compute for PHP
  • Drupal installation – modules, themes, and sample content

The wait is worth it – you get a fully functional, production-quality CMS to evaluate.

While you wait: Explore the CloudFormation Events tab to watch resources being created. You can also browse other areas of the AWS Console – deployment continues in the background.

You'll need

  • Your CloudFormation stack to show CREATE_COMPLETE
  • The DrupalUrl from your stack's Outputs tab
  • The AdminUsername and AdminPassword from Outputs

What you'll learn

For content editors

  • How to navigate the Drupal admin interface
  • How to find and edit existing content
  • How the WYSIWYG editor works
  • How LocalGov Drupal organises council content

For service managers

  • LocalGov Drupal's content structure
  • How service pages are organised
  • The admin dashboard overview
  • How to prepare reports for stakeholders

Content types you'll see

LocalGov Drupal includes pre-built content types for UK councils:

Service Pages

Waste & Recycling, Planning, Council Tax, Housing and more

Guide Pages

Step-by-step guides like "How to apply for planning permission"

News Articles

Council announcements and updates

Start walkthrough

Takes approximately 40 minutes

Need help?

If you're stuck, check the troubleshooting section or contact us.