My LocalGov Drupal contributions for August 2025

August is a little quiet for meetings in LocalGov Drupal land. We close up all the meetings except Merge Tuesday while lots of people are away on holidays. On the flip side, that gives me a bit more time to write some code.

Meetings

1. Merge Tuesdays: The big story from Merge Tuesdays this month was the release of 3.0.0 of LocalGov Microsites Base, with all the goodness of the new grid system from LocalGov Base.

Code Contributions

1. Reviewing a simple PR that becomes a headache: basically what prop type is an attribute in Drupal.
2. We all (or at least lots of us) use and love DDEV. I created a web component a few months ago to display a banner on any website with the DDEV sponsor Call to Action. The DDEV folk have updated their API so they sponsor amount can now be dynamically created in the web component and asked me to update the web component. So now if they update their requested sponsor amount, anyone using the web component to display the banner will also get the new update automatically. Not exactly LGD, but definitely a tool a lot of us LGD developers use.
3. What looks like it might be a tricky issue often turns out simple. We are no longer printing empty h4 tags for facets if there is no facet title.
4. I tried to focus on Microsites as much as possible this month, starting off with a tricky issue we have with the new grid system vs the alignment of blocks in the footer. I think I might have a fix for it now.
5. I'm very surprised no one has noticed until now, but if you click anywhere on a page on mobile for our microsites, then the focus is immediately set to the 'Menu' button. It was only noticed when Dan tried to click on an input for directories. I have a PR ready for it now.
6. I created/updated a PR so we have a better aria-label for facet blocks for Directory Channels on Microsites. But ...
7. Then I had the idea that it would be good to apply this to all LocalGov Drupal sites, so I created an issue to apply it to LocalGov Base and also a PR to go with it.
8. There is an open issue for a very tricky bug/feature (not sure which) that we have, in that we have a CSS class called .padding-horizontally which was added liberally to templates so that content would not bump up against the side of a page. However, this class means some things have more padding than others when you have nested templates. Christopher and me have started a major PR to fix this (and add some extra features to a new component we are creating called 'Section') so we can stipulate if it's a bleed component, or constrained component, etc. Hopefully we'll get this finished in the next few weeks and release it as part of a new major version of LocalGov Base.
9. Another item that's been a bit frustrating is our original JavaScript for the Step-by-Step components, which doesn't fully follow Drupal best-practices (e.g. text strings are not translatable, it's using jQuery, etc). We started some discussions about, then Christopher wrote a PR for it, and I got it tested and approved. Team Work!
10. I got some nice work done on the Modules List module, which will become part of the LocalGov Drupal Telemetry suite. Two items I fixed and released were updating the code to follow Drupal's coding standards, and changing the path from admin/modules/overview to admin/modules/modules-list.
11. Following that, I created an issue to add a submodule for Modules List module to list some system information such as Drupal version, PHP version, Database type, etc. I have that ready now in a merge request but don't want to merge it until we chat about it at a Tech Group Drop-in. I'm unsure if it should be a submodule (it doesn't really have anything to do with modules list) or a standalone module or perhaps it's a security issue and should not be a module at all! So many questions.
12. Fixed two tiny issues with the Scarfolk theme. Those kinds of issues that are hanging around for ages, but are so simple no one wants to look at them.
13. For the LocalGov Replicate module, we check the route name of that current route and then change the word 'Replicate' to 'Clone'. This becomes inefficient since we don't know what modules/routes may be added in the future to a site. So now I have it fixed to check for any route that begins with entity.node..
14. Following on from this, Replicate module dropdown operations button on admin/content uses 'Replicate' as it's string instead of 'Clone'. But not any more.
15. And then I had a major item to check with the LocalGov Replicate module: does it work with microsites? Answer = no. So I wrote a localgov_replicate_microsites submodule to fix that. We now have an RC1 release for the LocalGov Replicate and will hopefully have a 1.0.0 full release next week.
16. As part of our 'Editor Experience' mission, we want to start standardising the names of our tabs when editing content. I not have PRs open for the first tab in each content type to be 'Content' instead of the current jumble of 'Content', 'Details', 'Description', etc.
17. Another part of our 'Editor Experience' missing is being able to add names to our documents, so that when they are displayed on the screen to users it will read something like this: My File (PDF, 2MB), instead of like this currently: my-file.pdf (PDF, 2MB). I've opened two PRs to sort this (1 and 2) and also a follow-up PR to make things even better.
18. The Blogs Module is one that gets a little left aside (I think), as I don't know if many people even know it's there. So I did a good triage of the issues and nominated myself as a maintainer.
19. Another 'Editor Experience' item we have is to change the listing at admin/content so it lists the last person to update a piece of content rather than the owner of the content, and then also be able to filter by that criteria. I created a PR for most of that, but can't figure out how to filter by the username of the last person to update the content (I can only figure out how to filter by their user ID).
20. Since our "newsroom" field on the news article content type is a required field, we print a message reminding editors "Hey, you need to create a newsroom first", but if a council sets that field as not required, the message is still printed. I created a PR to only show the message if the field is required, but also to hide the field if there are no newsrooms available and the field is not required.

Online Course: Build a LocalGov Drupal Website

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Filed Under:

1. Drupal Planet
2. Drupal
3. Open Source
4. LocalGov Drupal