Back in 2022, Chicken worked with Hammersmith & Fulham to plan the rebuild of lbhf.gov.uk on LocalGov Drupal. One of their key requirements was subsites, different to microsites in that they are within the main website content but look a little different. Flexible spaces that could make the most of all the content types LGD offers, such as directories, guides, and step-by-step pages.
At the time, LGD’s subsite functionality was limited. It relied on two fixed content types: Subsite Overview and Subsite Page. That meant you couldn’t:
- Use other content types within a subsite
- Automatically pull in related sub-pages (for example, all guide pages under a guide overview)
- Integrate with Drupal’s menu system for navigation
- Choose any content type to be the subsite homepage
To meet H&F’s needs, we built a new module, lbhf_subsites, which solved these issues.
How H&F used it
The module supported a range of high-profile subsites, including:
These showed how flexible subsites could be, and quickly drew interest from the wider LocalGov Drupal community.
From H&F to everyone
When Essex County Council rebuilt essex.gov.uk on LGD, they asked whether H&F’s module could be shared with the community. With H&F’s support, we contributed it back as localgov_subsites_extras.
Since then, it’s already been adopted and improved:
- Essex use it for their Fostering subsite
- Dumfries & Galloway use it for the Gretna Registration Office
- Other councils are now building on top of it, finding and fixing issues, and suggesting enhancements
The open-source version is stronger than the original. Councils share the cost of development and benefit from ongoing improvements, while the whole community gains from features that would have been too expensive for any single organisation to build alone.
A community effort
This work was funded through the LocalGov Drupal Community Fund. Councils and suppliers who contribute to the fund help make features like this possible, spreading the benefits across the sector.