What is Convivial Gov?
Convivial Gov is a Drupal "site template". A complete, pre-configured starting point that bundles code, theme and demo content together. It's generic enough to suit a wide range of sites beyond government too, including publishing, marketing and agency websites.
It's one of the first templates released into the new Drupal Marketplace, a centralised hub launched at DrupalCon Chicago for downloading and commercialising pre-packaged Drupal site templates. Morpht built Convivial Gov to showcase what's possible with this new generation of Drupal tooling, and to give the community, and our clients a genuine head start on government projects.
Take the live demo for a spin, or read the Drupal.org listing for installation instructions.
Built on Drupal Canvas
At the core of Convivial Gov is Drupal Canvas, the modern visual page builder introduced as part of Drupal's Starshot initiative. Canvas gives editors a drag and drop interface built from reusable components, so pages can be assembled without needing deep technical knowledge. This puts Drupal on a more even footing with page builders like Webflow and Squarespace.
Underneath Canvas, everything is built with Single Directory Components (SDCs) and Recipes, giving developers a modern, maintainable architecture that's easy to extend and keep consistent as the site grows.
A comprehensive component library
Pages are assembled from a broad set of components, grouped by role:
- Layout and structure: banners, grids, groups, heroes, layouts and sections for shaping almost any page design.
- Content presentation: cards, teasers, tiles and summaries for showcasing content consistently.
- Rich content elements: accordions, tabs, sliders, stats and video for richer page experiences.
- Interface elements: buttons, headings, badges, icons and modals for clear calls to action.
- Backgrounds and behaviour: image, parallax and video backgrounds, plus interactive touches like scroll-reveal animation and palette swapping as users move down the page.
Full control over look and feel
Convivial Gov ships with a powerful theme UI so site owners can control their visual identity without writing code. The frontend is powered by Tailwind CSS with DaisyUI providing a semantic component layer on top, enabling rapid, consistent theming.
- Skins: create and apply unlimited skins across a site, each with automatic light/dark mode detection and manual toggle, ideal for campaigns or landing pages that need their own look and feel.
- Palettes: define standard, primary, secondary, neutral and other palettes, all driven by CSS variables and checked against WCAG 2.2 AA contrast requirements.
- Typography: set global font families, sizes and display styles to establish hierarchy, especially for hero content.
- Design controls: fine-tune border radius, spacing, field sizes and effects like depth and noise directly from the theme UI.
Content types for government sites
Alongside Canvas-built pages, Convivial Gov includes a set of structured content types, each with its own fields to keep content consistent across the site:
- Alert: time-sensitive, dismissible notices.
- Article: time-based publishing content.
- Audience: categorise content by who it's for.
- Event: reach and inform your audience about events.
- Page: general-purpose site structure and static content.
- Person: authors and staff profiles.
- Resource: evergreen reference information.
- Section: landing pages.
- Topic: categorise content by subject.
All of these (aside from Page and Section) come with Views already configured on landing pages, so new content appears automatically once published.
Accessible and performant by design
Government projects come with a high bar for accessibility, and Convivial Gov is built to meet it: WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance, built-in contrast checking across every palette, and a component library that's been iterated on extensively for strong Lighthouse performance.
Get started
Convivial Gov is free to download and install as a Drupal CMS site template. The underlying Morphos theme is distributed separately and requires a licence for production use (the licence terms are permissive for development and client work, with restrictions mainly around resale or repackaging).
If you'd like help planning, building or extending a government site on Convivial Gov, get in touch — we'd love to talk about your project.
