FAQ

Drutopia is a website building platform based on the Drupal 8 (soon to be Drupal 9) content management system (CMS) that is specifically designed to meet the needs of small, grassroots groups.

Our goal is to pool resources that groups spend on website individual development to be able to build a tool that everyone can use.

Drutopia comes with a number of different content types so you can easily organize your group’s website content.

• Articles, blog, pages, people and resources allow you to quickly create posts with relevant and current information.
• Actions, campaign and events are designed to get website visitors involved.

• You can show related content so that posts with similar tags are displayed.
• You can build a storyline to tell your group’s history.
• You can develop a FAQ page with collapsible question and answer sets.
• You can use the built in group functionality that allows you to organize into smaller sub-groups within your site.

• Site visitors have an easy to use main navigation menu for easy discovery.
• Many of the landing pages (sections) have filters so users can drill down to find the information they are looking for.
• Filtered search (using “facets”--clickable links) provides an easy way for visitors to find relevant information.

• Drutopia is very straightforward once your site is installed and some initial configuration is done. From that point on, posting content is designed for the non-technical user and basically creating a post is just filling out a form.
• Drutopia uses a system within Drupal called Paragraphs which lets you add different paragraph types to content, so you can add text, images, etc., and then rearrange their order of display giving you more flexibility than in many CMS platforms.

• The home page comes with a number of configurable blocks so you can highlight sections of your site or particular pieces of content.
• The home page also has a number of blocks that show the latest posts within certain content types allowing your home page to stay fresh.

• The standard theme (which in Drupal controls how the site looks) is called Octavia. It’s a clean and streamlined theme that allows you to build a visually appealing site through the use of images.
• Within the Octavia theme, there are a number of “skins” that you can choose from that provide different colour palettes and fonts.

• Drutopia is fully open source so you can set up and host yourself if you’re technologically savvy. That said, it’s complicated to install and most shared hosting platforms are not great for Drupal 8 sites—which we know is a real problem.
• Groups sign up to use the hosted version which is available for US$50 per month (US$500 per year). This gives you your site as well as updates to stay current and get the latest features as they are developed.
• The hosting platform managed by Agaric may eventually become a co-operative and so groups will have a voice and vote in the running of the platform and in determining what priorities are for new features and functionality.
• Canadian groups can get set up through Chocolate Lily and a Canadian-based server.

You can hire one of the Drutopia partners to build a new feature that will get rolled into Drutopia or you can post a suggestion that may get picked up by the team or you can be part of the platform co-op and have a voice for your desired functionality that way.

• Yes, you can use Drutopia with a custom theme so that it has its own look. That can be done whether you are hosting yourself on on the Drutopia hosting platform (for an additional change).
• You can also use Drutopia on your own and add to it as you wish. Our goal, however, is that when users see something they would like, we can build it out in such a way that everyone can benefit.

Yes we have an extensive documentation site for Drutopia both for end users who want to understand how to work with their site and for developers who want to contribute to the project.

End user documentation

Developer documentation