Talking Drupal #571 - GovHub

Today we are talking about GovHub, Drupal in Government, and Why Governments Love Drupal with guest Jasmyne Epps. We’ll also cover Convivial Gov Site Template as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/571

Topics

• GovHub Origins and Goals
• Feature Requests and Governance
• Why Government Chooses Drupal
• Team Structure and Release Cadence
• Accessibility and Compliance Strategy
• Hosting Model and Multisite
• Structured Content and Microcontent
• Syndication and Emergency Alerts
• Orchard Design System Explained
• Training and Onboarding Editors
• Gov Talks Conference
• Logo Specs and Releases
• Ticket Prioritization PRICE
• QA Workflow with Tugboat
• Handling Traffic Spikes
• Drupal 11 Performance Talk
• Drupal 11 Upgrade Gotchas
• Getting Users Excited
• Translation Strategy Limits
• Why Government Loves Drupal

Resources

• GovHub
• The Bug Stops Here — The State of Georgia Shifts Left (GovCon 2025 presentation with Jasmyne Epps and James Sansbury)
• Accelerating an ambitious migration and development project (GovHub + Tugboat migration story)
• Logo page
• Public facing knowledge base
• Orchard design system
• (P)Rice
  • (P)olitics - (R)each - (I)mpact - (C)onfidence - (E)ffort
• Luma

Guests

Jasmyne Epps - jasmyneepps.com jasmyneepps

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Amber Matz - tugboatqa.com [amber himes matz](https://www.drupal.org/u/amber himes matz)

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to stand up a polished, accessible government website in Drupal (with components, content types, SEO, and cookie consent all wired up) without writing any code? There's a site template for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Convivial Gov
• Brief history
  • Created in March 2026 by Morpht, the shop behind the Convivial family — with Ivan Zugec leading the maintainer team.
  • Versions available: 1.3.3, which works with Drupal 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained: release just last week, on September 16th
  • Security coverage
  • Test coverage: functional tests for install and validation, plus a kernel requirements test.
  • Documentation there's a full handbook over at docs.morpht.com, and a live demo at gov.convivial.io
  • Open issues: none?
• Site template features and usage
  • Like the Haven site template we talked about a couple of weeks ago, Convivial Gov gives you a curated stack plus demo content, and in this case hands you a robust, ready-to-customize government site.
  • Because it’s built on Drupal CMS, you get all the latest Drupal tooling: Canvas for visual page building, Single Directory Components, and Recipes.
  • The front end is Morpht's Morphos theme, built on Tailwind and DaisyUI, so you get dark mode, multiple colour palettes, and a big library of editor-friendly components out of the box. It’s worth mentioning that using the Morphos theme on a production site requires a paid license
  • The provided components are sorted into six buckets: container, content, child, element, background, and behavior. They include fun ones like scroll reveal and a colour palette switching behavior
  • The content model is broad. You get seven content types: Page, Section, Article, Publication, Resource, Topic, and Audience. And, they come with a stack of teaser and card view modes to display them.
  • The whole point is no-code: a site builder can compose sophisticated pages in Canvas without ever touching a template.
  • One thing to watch: the default timezone is Australia/Sydney out of the box
  • It’s also worth comparing Convivial Gov to another site template called Local. Both dropped in March 2026, both are Canvas-based Drupal CMS site templates for the public sector, and both lean on ECA for automation — so there's real common ground. The difference is scope and mechanism. Local, from Annertech, is narrowly purpose-built for local councils and community-service directories: it ships a specific service information architecture — Service and Service Landing content types — with ECA wired so section pages stay in sync when service pages get published or updated, taking its cues from the gov.uk design system. Convivial Gov goes the other way — it's design-system-led and general-purpose, a broad component library and content model meant for any government, agency, or marketing site rather than one particular workflow.