Talking Drupal #574 - UN Open Source Week

Today we are talking about the UN, Open Source, and Drupal with guests Tim Lehnen & Henry Poole. We’ll also cover Live Update as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/574

Topics

• What Is UN Open Source Week
• Why Open Source Fits UN Goals
• Who Attends and What Tech Is There
• Conference Audience and DPI DPG
• Drupal as a Digital Public Good
• UN Uses Drupal at Scale
• Why Attend and What to Gain
• Upstream First Contracting
• Open Procurement Curriculum
• Reaching Procurement Conferences
• Steering Spend Upstream
• Funding Open Source Legally
• Talking Louder Beyond Drupal
• Digital Sovereignty Explained
• Governance Values Matter
• Fixing Funding Perception
• Community Next Steps Closing

Resources

• Appalachia
• Omar Mohsine
• Digital public infrastructure - DPI
• Digital public good - DPG
• ShareIT act
  • Agencies need to use open source
  • PDF: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-17951/pdf/COMPS-17951.pdf
• Ditap
• NCMA
• Sovereign tech agency
• Palantir blog
• Eva black - Four opens
• FSF - Four freedoms
• Drupal’s open web manifesto
  • https://www.drupal.org/association/open-web-manifesto
  • https://openwebsitealliance.org/charter.html#open-web-manifesto

Guests

Henry Poole - civicactions.com henry-poole
Tim Lehnen - drupal.org hestenet

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Tim Sharp - tea-sharp

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted parts of your Drupal pages, like blocks, views, or notifications, to update in real time without a page refresh, and without having to stand up extra infrastructure to do it? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Live Update
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2026 by Alessandro Feijó (afeijo) of Mindcore
  • Versions available: 1.0.0-alpha6, which works with Drupal 11 and 12
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, latest release just a week ago
  • No security coverage yet, since it was just created and only has alpha releases
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation: a detailed README, plus a roadmap doc and a built-in demo page
  • Number of open issues: none
• Usage stats:
  • 14 sites
• Module features and usage
  • Live Update positions itself as a generic real-time event layer for Drupal: modules publish events to named channels, and browsers subscribed to those channels update just the affected part of the page
  • Out of the box it uses plain HTTP polling back to Drupal, every 5 seconds by default, so it works on pretty much any host with no extra services
  • The transport is pluggable, though. Set it to automatic and it'll try WebSockets first, then an experimental Server-Sent Events submodule, then fall back to polling
  • For site builders, the base module adds an "Update this block live" checkbox to any block in the block layout, no code needed
  • There's also a whole suite of submodules: live-refreshing Views displays, single-entity updates, user presence blocks like "who's viewing this page", a notification bell with toasts, queue progress monitoring, remote JSON API tables, and an admin dashboard with an event monitor
  • One I think editorial teams will like: Live Update Form, which warns you when someone else is editing the same content you are
  • For developers, publishing is one line, a liveupdate_publish() helper or an injectable service, and on the front end you can either use data attributes in your markup or subscribe through a small JavaScript API
  • Every channel is access-controlled, and modules can weigh in on who's allowed to subscribe through by implementing hook_liveupdate_channel_access()
  • Under the hood, events are stored in their own database table with an optional time-to-live, and expired ones get cleaned up on cron. Polling clients just ask for anything newer than the last event ID they saw
  • There's a solid set of Drush commands too, including one to publish a test event straight from the command line, which is handy for debugging
  • Caveat: this is very new and still alpha, so I'd treat it as one to watch and experiment with rather than deploy into production today
  • And if polling isn't enough for you, there's a companion project, Live Update Go: https://www.drupal.org/project/liveupdate_go
  • It's the push transport Live Update is designed around. A small Drupal module, plus a standalone gateway written in Go that gives browsers a native WebSocket connection
  • Drupal stays in charge: it checks channel access, hands the browser a short-lived signed token, and sends signed events to the gateway, which fans them out to connected clients
  • You run the gateway as its own service, with systemd or Docker, behind a TLS reverse proxy. The README is very clear that you shouldn't try to launch it from PHP
  • It can scale horizontally using Redis or Valkey pub/sub, one gateway can serve multiple Drupal sites with isolated tenants, and if it ever goes down, Live Update falls back automatically and switches back once it recovers
  • Same maintainer, created at the start of October, and also alpha, with an alpha1 release and one reported site so far