Platform & Admin tools

Open Intranet ships with a curated set of small admin tools that cover the long tail of “oh, we also need this on a serious intranet” features. Each one is a few clicks to use and a few minutes to configure, so they are documented together rather than as separate pages. They are:

Backup & Migrate — On-demand and scheduled backups of the database (and, when needed, files / config).
Auto Logout — Per-role idle-time logout for security-sensitive roles.
Coffee — A Cmd+K command palette to jump anywhere on the site.
Simple XML Sitemap — SEO-friendly sitemap generation for indexed pages.
Theme Switcher — Apply different themes per role, language or path.
Masquerade — Switch into another user’s session (for support / debugging).
Diff — Side-by-side comparison of any two revisions.

Backup & Migrate

/admin/config/development/backup_migrate is the central admin page. The tool exposes five tabs — Backup, Restore, Saved Backups, Schedules, Settings:

Backup and Migrate admin page with the Backup tab open: Quick Backup form with Backup Source (Default Drupal Database), Backup Destination (Download), an optional note toggle and a Backup now button

Backup — One-click create a backup. Pick a source (the Drupal DB, a folder on disk, the public files folder, the private files folder) and a destination (download to your browser, save to the server, push to S3 / Dropbox / Google Drive / FTP).
Restore — Upload a backup file or pick from saved backups.
Saved Backups — Manage backups stored on the server. Delete, restore, download.
Schedules — Create cron-driven schedules (“daily at 02:00, keep last 14, push to S3”).
Settings — Compression (gzip / bzip2 / zip), exclude tables (cache, sessions), notifications by e-mail.

The tool’s own UI warns not to use the Entire site backup mode for anything but the smallest sites — for production sites a database-only backup plus a separate file-system backup is the standard approach.

Auto Logout

Auto Logout (drupal/autologout) ships in composer.json and is enabled in production deployments where regulated data is involved.

When enabled, it adds a per-role idle-time logout policy at /admin/config/people/autologout:

Per-role timeout — Different roles can have different timeouts (e.g. 60 minutes for Authenticated user, 15 minutes for HR officer).
Inactivity warning — A countdown dialog appears N seconds before logout with a Stay logged in button.
Whitelisted paths — URLs that should not extend the timer (e.g. an iframe / embed page).
Cross-tab — Activity in one browser tab keeps every tab logged in.

For an intranet that holds sensitive HR / finance data this is the single most important setting to tune up after the initial install.

Coffee — command palette

Coffee is a small JavaScript command palette: press Alt+D (or Alt+Ctrl+D on Mac, configurable) and a fuzzy-search input pops up. Type the first few letters of any admin page, content title, taxonomy term or user — Coffee jumps directly there.

It indexes all the admin menu items and surfaces them with a single keystroke. For an editor working through many pages, this saves dozens of clicks a day.

The settings page at /admin/config/user-interface/coffee lets the admin add custom shortcuts (e.g. site logo → /admin/config/system/site-information) and pick which menus / content types feed the index.

Simple XML Sitemap

Simple XML Sitemap generates an /sitemap.xml that lists every indexed page on the site. The admin page at /admin/config/search/simplesitemap shows the configured sitemaps:

Simple XML Sitemap admin page

For an intranet the sitemap is rarely consumed by a public crawler, but it is still useful for:

Internal search engines (Solr / Elasticsearch) that crawl the URL list.
Health checks (“how many pages do we publish?”).
Migrations and link-checking.

Per content-type / per-bundle the admin chooses whether to include a bundle, and at what priority and change frequency. The sitemap regenerates on cron (or on-demand from the admin page).

Theme Switcher

The Theme Switcher module adds rule-based theme assignment. The admin page at /admin/config/system/theme_switcher lists the configured rules — each rule pairs a selector (URL path, role, language, content type) with a theme to render with.

Theme Switcher admin page with the rule list

Common use-cases:

A dedicated theme for /admin/* (e.g. Gin Admin) and the default frontend theme everywhere else.
A white-label theme for a specific tenant URL (e.g. /partners/* uses a partner-specific theme).
A language-specific theme for an Arabic or Hebrew language version (RTL support).

Rules have priorities so that overlapping rules resolve deterministically.

Masquerade

Masquerade lets an administrator switch into another user’s session for support and debugging. From the user list (/admin/people) or from a user’s profile page, click Masquerade as. The admin’s interface re-renders as that user — same blocks, same access, same dashboards.

A persistent Unmasquerade badge sits in the header so the admin knows they are masquerading and can switch back with one click.

This is the canonical “can you reproduce the bug as me?” tool: when a user reports a missing page or a permission issue, the admin masquerades, sees exactly what the user sees, fixes the misconfiguration and switches back.

Permissions are tightly controlled: a Masquerade permission is required, and admins are excluded from masquerading as another admin (so the audit trail is preserved).

Diff

The Diff module adds a Compare tab to every revisioned entity. Pick any two revisions, click Compare — the page renders a side-by-side or unified diff with field-by-field colouring (added text in green, removed text in red, edited text highlighted).

It works on every revisioned entity — News, Pages, KB pages, Events, Webform configurations, Documents — so any admin investigating what changed between yesterday and today has a one-click answer.

How they fit together

These tools share a small but always-on design philosophy:

Tool	Primary user	Primary use-case
Backup & Migrate	Hosting admin	Disaster recovery, pre-update snapshot
Auto Logout	Security admin	Compliance — automatic session termination
Coffee	Every admin / editor	Faster navigation between admin pages
Simple XML Sitemap	Site builder	Internal index and external SEO (when public)
Theme Switcher	Site builder	Per-context theming (admin vs frontend, multi-tenant)
Masquerade	Support / training	Reproduce a user’s experience
Diff	Editor / approver	Audit what changed between two revisions

Integration with other features

Backup & Migrate + Cron — Schedules run on Drupal cron (or external systemd / Kubernetes cron via drush bam-backup).
Auto Logout + Access Control & Groups — Per-role timeouts can be tied to specific high-privilege groups (e.g. HR officer gets 15 minutes, Authenticated user gets 8 hours).
Coffee + Custom URL aliases — Pathauto-generated aliases are indexed by Coffee, so editors can fuzzy-search by article title.
Simple XML Sitemap + Multilingual — Generates one sitemap per language, properly linked with <xhtml:link rel="alternate">.
Theme Switcher + Multilingual — Pair with the Language condition for full RTL theming.
Masquerade + Engagement scoring — Engagement events recorded while masquerading are correctly attributed (or excluded, depending on configuration).
Diff + Revisions — Works on every Drupal revisioned entity; pairs naturally with the Revisions tab on News, KB pages, Pages.

Permissions

Tool	Permission	Default role(s)
Backup & Migrate	Perform backups / restore	Administrator
Auto Logout	Configure auto-logout	Administrator
Coffee	Use Coffee	Authenticated user (configurable per role)
Sitemap	Administer sitemap	Administrator
Theme Switcher	Administer theme-switcher rules	Administrator
Masquerade	Masquerade as any user / role	Administrator
Diff	View diffs	Authenticated user (with revision-view)

Modules behind it

Learn more

News, Knowledge Base, Pages, Events — every revisioned content type pairs with Diff
Multilingual — pairs with Theme Switcher (per-language theme) and Sitemap (per-language sitemaps)
Access Control & Groups — informs Auto Logout policy and Masquerade permissions