Talking Drupal #545 - DKAN

Today we are talking about the open data platform DKAN, what it's used for, and how it applies to Drupal with guests Liz Tupper & Dan Feder. We'll also cover Modern Drupal Dashboard as our module of the week.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/545

Topics

• What Is DKAN
• Who Uses Open Data
• 20:08 DKAN Origin Story
• Why Drupal Fits DKAN
• From Distribution to Module
• DKAN 2 Rebuild and JSON Shift
• Async Jobs and API First
• How Teams Publish Data
• What a Dataset Really Is
• Metadata vs Data Access
• Why DKAN Left Drupal Org
• Migration Path to DKAN Four
• Harvesting and Data Store ETL
• APIs Visualizations and Bots
• Roadmap Data Store and AI
• Contributing and Where to File Issues

Resources

• DKAN
• DKAN Drupal Module
• DKAN on GitHub
• Public sites using DKAN 2
• DKAN channel on Drupal Slack
• JSON Form Widget

Guests

Liz Tupper - civicactions.com etupper
Dan Feder - getdkan.org dafeder

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Steve Wirt - civicactions.com Swirt

MOTW Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to have your Drupal site admins start with a fast, widget-based interface that surfaces key site metrics, system health, and operational insights? There's a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • Modern Drupal Dashboard
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Feb 2026 by Gaurav Kapoor (gaurav.kapoor) of werk21 in Berlin
  • Versions available: 1.0.5, which works with Drupal core 10.3 and 11
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained
  • Security coverage
  • Number of open issues: no open issues
• Usage stats:
  • 4 sites
• Module features and usage
  • With the module installed, site visitors with the new "Access modern dashboard" permission can access a React-based dashboard with widgets to provide insights on topics like:
  • Content overview: total content count, published vs unpublished, and per content type breakdown.
  • Users overview: user count per role (users with multiple roles are counted in each role), plus pie chart visualization.
  • Additional Content (Entity overview): lists all entity types (content + configuration), shows counts, and provides direct "Manage" links.
  • Modules overview: installed modules summary, including enabled/disabled and core/contrib breakdown.
  • System & status: key environment details such as Drupal core version, PHP version, and database information.
  • Health checks: displays Drupal requirement checks grouped by status (pass/warning/error) with a dedicated detail view.
  • Each widget can be clicked to open a detail view of the extended data, making it easy for admins to dig into any area
  • The widget-based architecture should also help to pull in data from other sources, potentially including things like analytics