Australian government sites run Drupal at scale because it is GPL, structures content as entities, and ships a serious access model. That is infrastructure, not a preference.
A document library is civic plumbing: annual reports, FOI packs, submissions and factsheets must be searchable, countable and released under controlled conditions.
Drupal’s private file system plus role visibility plus publish windows match how agencies actually work. Not everyone sees everything, and nothing stays live forever.
The Joomla wmDownloads package already handled this pattern. Eli Afram — Drupal developer, founder of WM Studios — ported it to Drupal using native APIs, not a wrapper. That is unpaid open-source work. The point is not a press release. The point is one mental model across the mixed CMS estates agencies actually run.
Same model, different stack
The Drupal module keeps CSV import, hit counting on actual delivery, protected redirects, a latest-downloads block, category vocabulary and role filters. It also respects Core Search and Views when those modules are enabled.
It ships as webmasterstudios/wmdownloads under GPL-2.0-or-later and requires PHP 8.3+ with a configured private file path. Uninstall cleans the vocabulary, config and private://wmdownloads directory.
WordPress and Joomla versions exist for the same reason: agencies rarely run a single CMS. The Drupal package is simply the one that lands where most public-facing government work already lives.
Check the package at https://wmstudios.com.au/open-source/wmdownloads-drupal. The rest is just matching the tools to the estate that is already there.