Talking Drupal #453 - Urban Institute

June 03, 2024

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 We’ll also cover Access Unpublished as our module of the week.

Listen:

direct Link

Topics

  • Tell us how you got started with Drupal
  • What does Urban Institute do
  • What do you do at Urban Institute
    • Number of people on dev team
    • Number of sites
  • How does Urban Institute use Drupal
  • Are you using a custom upstream
  • How many sites on Drupal 7
  • Are you doing Page builders
  • What kind of front end tools do you use
  • What is the preferred local development tool
  • Why did Urban Institute choose Drupal
  • What is the hardest part of using Drupal at a large non profit
  • What is the most interesting interactive experience you have built for Urban Institute

Resources

Module of the Week

Access Unpublished
  • Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu
  • Brief description:
    • Have you ever wanted to get feedback on unpublished content from people who aren’t users on your Drupal site? There’s a module for that.
  • Module name/project name:
  • Brief history
    • 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    • Once installed, this module adds a new element to your unpublished entity forms, for generating links with a special hash value.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allows you to set the URL parameter that will be used for access, gives you options to modify the HTTP headers on the unpublished page, and has a check box you can use to delete all expired tokens.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.
  • Necessary Patch: https://www.drupal.org/project/access_unpublished/issues/3421309
  • Not to be confused with https://www.drupal.org/project/preview_link
    • Preview link is missing the ability to set length of access.