Drupal features

Find out about the features and functionality of UCL's main web content management system built in Drupal.

The Drupal interface is clear and intuitive and there is helptext describing fields and advising on format and length. Back-end tasks like re-ordering pages and restructuring your website are simple and fast. Workflow allows you to keep on top of content quality.

Content types

Drupal has a range of different content templates designed to meet the needs of a particular content type.

Detail pages (Drupal content)

• Pages
• News
• Events
• Case Studies
• Research Projects
• Publications
• Policies

Detail pages (consuming and displaying information from other UCL systems)

• Undergraduate programme pages
• Postgraduate taught programme pages
• Postgraduate research programme pages
• Staff profiles (IRIS)

Landing pages

The main Drupal landing page template is extremely flexible and combines curated teasers (i.e. teasers where you control the content, feeds of Drupal and external content) with standard web content to produce a wide variety of content display options. 

The landing page includes

• Teasers (boxes) 
• Vertical link list with teasers (list)
• Combined teaser boxes with vertical teaser list (hybrid)
• External RSS and Drupal content feeds
• Optional sidebar
• Optional left menu
• Two- and three-column teaser box layout
• Add and remove teasers in rows
• Change layout without losing content
• The full range of text editor functionality for certain fields (e.g. image carousels: see below.)

Tagging and feeds

Editors can display dynamic content on landing pages or detail pages based on combining content types with subject tags or organisational units. This allows for easy surfacing of content across the site or across a family of sites e.g. departments within a faculty. 

If required, users can also apply filters to further refine these feeds.

We’re working on further refining the use of feeds by making optional automated ‘latest’ feeds for the sidebars of e.g. news posts.

For more on tagging and feeds, see the how-to guide.

Embed media from third-party sites

Editors can embed content within their web pages from the following third-party or UCL platforms including:

Design options

Standard Drupal sites all use UCL’s design pattern library Indigo, are fully responsive and accessible and embody the UCL online brand. 

Colour options: The full Indigo colour palette is now available in Drupal

Navigation options: Drupal sites include as standard: horizontal menu/left menu with new and improved UX and clear visual indicators for parent section, current section and sibling sections. We are planning further improvements to the user experience of navigation by streamlining the menu so it displays only the parent and children pages within a section.

Text editor functionality

The Drupal text editor allow standard formatting as well as layout changes (columns, box-outs, accordions) plus embedded feeds and rich media including image galleries, carousels and third-party media.

• A comprehensive list of text editor functionality 

Back-end content publishing functionality

As well as the front-end functionality that creates web content, Drupal also contains useful back-end content management features including but not limited to:

• Clear help text and labels
• Well-structured and semantic content layouts to support SEO
• Industry approved optimised meta tags for content sharing (OpenGraph, Twitter Cards and many more).
• Content approvals and workflow
• Content scheduling
• Automatic 301 redirects when page titles or menus change
• Automatic generation of clean, readable URLs
• Easy moving and saving of pages
• Bulk upload of media

Drupal roadmap

We are continually adding functionality and features to enhance the experience of web editors and support different content needs.

You can request new functionality by emailing Web Support Team with details and expected benefits.

Generally we will implement functionality:

• It benefits a wide segment of our user base and can be rolled out to all/many areas
• It doesn’t conflict with our technical strategy or with accessibility and best practice advice
• As with all work, it will be prioritised according to our web prioritisation policy (find this on our Drupal page)

The current state of Drupal functionality will always be available on this page and we will communicate regularly with all editors on recently requested functionality and status (via our e-newsletter primarily which is sent to all Drupal Senior Editors). 

Recently released

• Event series: we have recently released a feature allowing the display of a feed of events from the same series on an event page. Find out more on our how-to: Drupal CMS: Create an event.