Demo guide

Northlight University is a fictional demo site showcasing Drupal AI on Drupal CMS, powered by amazee.ai. Everything here — departments, courses, people — is stock Drupal: content types, taxonomies and Views shipped as recipes, with no custom modules. The site sends X-Robots-Tag: noindex so none of this fiction ends up in search engines.

Demo accounts

The shared password is set by the site operator via the DEMO_USER_PASSWORD environment variable (locally it defaults to northlight). Every link below drops you on the personal dashboard after login.

Students — see “My courses” and “Upcoming exams”

Instructors — see “Courses I teach” and “My students”

The AI features, and how to try each one

1. Ask Northlight — the RAG chatbot

The chat widget in the bottom-right corner answers questions from the site's own content: every page is embedded into a pgvector database (hosted by amazee.ai) and the assistant retrieves the best-matching passages before answering. Good questions to try:

  • “Who teaches CS101 and when is the final exam?”
  • “How do I apply and what does tuition cost?”
  • “What marine biology courses run in the fall semester?”

2. AI search — ask in your own words

The Search page in the main menu runs on the same vector index as the chatbot: your query is matched by meaning, so “courses about the ocean” or “when do exams start?” work in any language. Administrators can inspect the index itself at Administration → Configuration → Search → Search API; new content is embedded automatically on save.

3. Role-based dashboards

Log in as a student or instructor (links above). Students get their enrolled courses and upcoming exams; instructors get the courses they teach and a student roster. This is plain Drupal Views — no custom code — and it shows how a real university portal fits on stock Drupal.

4. Editorial safety on a shared demo

As prof.hartley, open CS101 and edit it. The change saves as an unpublished draft: instructors have no publish permission, so the public site cannot be defaced from a shared demo account — and the pending draft doubles as a content-moderation demo.

5. AI in the editor (CKEditor)

Editors get AI assistance inside the rich-text editor: summarize, fix spelling, apply the house style guide, adjust tone. Edit any course or news body as an editor and open the AI assistant balloon in the toolbar.

6. Automators — fields that write themselves

Create a new course (as an editor) and leave the Description empty: on save, an AI automator writes a one-sentence teaser from the body. Upload an image into the media library and the alt text is generated the same way.

7. AI content review

At Create content → Content review, paste rough draft copy and save: two automators return suggested fixes with inline diff markup plus plain-language compliance notes. The seeded example “Draft: MB215 Whale Migration course page” shows real AI output.

8. AI translation

The site runs English and French. CS101 and MB110 already carry AI-generated French translations — use the Translate tab on any course to add more with one click.

9. Canvas AI — build pages with AI

Three of the four department pages are deliberately plain. Open one in the Canvas page builder and let Canvas AI design the landing page live — that's the demo.

10. MCP — let external AI agents query the site

The site is an MCP server with read-only content tools: connect your IDE or any MCP client and ask it to list Northlight's courses or programs. See the project readme for the connection command.

11. AI observability

Every AI call — chat, embeddings, translations, automators — is logged with model, tokens and latency on the admin dashboard, so you can show exactly what the AI integration does under the hood.