LocalGov Publications Importer Converts PDFs into Drupal Publications

Councils using LocalGov Drupal can use an open source module to convert uploaded PDFs into structured HTML publications. LocalGov Publications Importer places the resulting content in the LocalGov Drupal Publications feature, where editors can review and refine it before publishing. The Drupal.org project page lists version 1.1.0 as a stable, security-covered release for Drupal 10 and Drupal 11.

The module addresses the practical problem of council PDF backlogs. Long reports, plans, strategies, guidance and policy documents can require substantial manual work to recreate as accessible web content. The importer gives editors structured content to review rather than requiring them to rebuild each document page by page.

The DropTimes first reported on the importer in October 2025 while Southwark Council and Chicken were developing its initial production version. A later webinar presented Southwark’s workflow and early results. The project subsequently reached stable release 1.1.0 on 31 March 2026, with security coverage for Drupal 10 and Drupal 11.

LocalGov Drupal says the importer can extract text, restore URLs as clickable links, pull many images into the Drupal media library, support headings, lists and tables, and create publication sections. Editors can manage the imported material like other LocalGov Drupal content. The resulting publication remains editable, allowing teams to correct errors, update information, add navigation and assign content ownership.

AI-assisted formatting is optional and is provided through the localgov_publications_importer_ai submodule. Drupal.org says the submodule requires the Drupal AI module and at least one AI provider module. The project has completed most of its development and testing on AWS Bedrock, is reported to work well with the Claude and Kimi models, and has also been used with Gemini in production.

The importer uses a plugin-based pipeline with extract, transform and save operations. Extract plugins place content from an uploaded file on an ImportInterface object, after which one or more transform plugins process it, and a save plugin creates the publication content. Drupal.org places these plugin types under Plugin/LocalGovImporter/Extract, Plugin/LocalGovImporter/Transform and Plugin/LocalGovImporter/Save.

Southwark Council funded the first production version in collaboration with Chicken, as lead maintainers, while the LocalGov Drupal project sponsored contribution time. West Lindsey District Council later funded work on cover pages, paragraph handling and imports from Word documents. The module is available as an open source Drupal project for other councils and Drupal teams to use and extend.

The project page lists nine maintainers: Rupert Jabelman, Andy Broomfield, ekes, Finn Lewis, the localgov project account, Maria Young, Mark Conroy, Stephen Cox and Tony Barker.

LocalGov Drupal says Southwark Council had more than 2,000 PDFs across its digital estate. Its product page reports that PDF-to-HTML conversion in the Southwark case study fell from hours, and sometimes days, to under one minute. Chicken separately estimates that a typical 50-page document requiring around 250 minutes of manual copying can be processed by the importer in under ten minutes.

These timings are examples rather than universal performance results. LocalGov Drupal notes that processing time varies with a document's size and complexity, and that Southwark’s content team reported that some imports took several minutes. Drupal.org currently lists 28 sites reporting use of the module.

LocalGov Drupal says Southwark Council and the Publications Importer won the 2026 AI Impact Award in the AI for Local Government & Community Services category. The organisation says the award recognised the reduction of manual publishing work and the project’s accessibility benefits. The module can be installed with composer require 'drupal/localgov_publications_importer:^1.1'.