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• Content overview: total content count, published vs unpublished, and per content type breakdown.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