localgovdrupal
Do we want to recommend Entity Share?
Cumbria is using https://www.drupal.org/docs/contributed-modules/entity-share to create whole site sections on a staging site which can be pushed to live when we're ready
One link can be sent to a service team, and they can see their content in context
This is better than sending a preview link to a single piece of content
Discussion at https://localgovdrupal.slack.com/archives/CSS2YS6BW/p1652693932762099
This feels useful enough to document, and recommend to other councils. What does the Technical Group think?
Thanks @willguv , very interesting, I've not used https://www.drupal.org/project/entity_share so don't have much to go on. It would be great to see a demo and have something written up on how to set it up.
Do we know if anyone else are using it?
It strikes me as a very different workflow from the standard approach of editing content directly on the live site, but it is certainly something that has been requested by clients in the past. I'd be interested to explore what limitations or logical / technical issues this might present.
Some documentation on standard and alternative approaches to using dev / test / live servers would also be good to share awareness of best practice in testing and deployment of code and configuration, as well as potentiallt content.
@ekes @markconroy @stephen-cox @budda any experience of Entity Share?
Looks like a specilist set up, requiring a dedicated content preview enviroment which might not always be avalible. I wonder if there is a way of expanding preview link to work with something like workbench instead.
BHCC solved this problem by creating a preview user role that can view unpublished content, however its a bit of a hack and not the ideal solution as needs login and content dashboard training instead of just sharing a link.
Thanks for commenting everyone. We think the main use of this is in a content design led transition of site content - closing an old site, and writing new sections based on user needs. It would only be used in BAU when whole sections are created and the service needs to approve everything before go live, and that's rare.
@benhillsjones may like to comment
@willguv Maybe document this approach and provide a module with some configuration like the Localgov Legacy Migration module that can be used as documentation / a starter kit for those looking to do something like this.
We have been using this as a proof-of-concept for getting info from one system to another system - send data from "intranet" to a central hub and then use entity_share in that central hub to push to a "website" (I'm using quote here because the intranet and website are not the same thing.
It was actually me who gave a demo of how this works to Dan in Cumbria to help with his content sharing needs.
We also have a few clients looking to use it, and thought it looked brilliant when we demoed it to them, but none have fully signed up to implement it just yet.
It's great for the use case of site sections and getting to deploy a whole new service for example.
I'm definitely not against adding it, but we'd probably need a little more discussion around it.
@msayoung @finnlewis this could be a best practice along the lines of what @andybroomfield describes above
@willguv Maybe document this approach and provide a module with some configuration like the Localgov Legacy Migration module that can be used as documentation / a starter kit for those looking to do something like this.
Cumbria identified entity share, Greenwich is using it. A lot of councils would find migration tips useful