My LocalGov Drupal contributions for July 2025

I took June off and spent the month in Spain with my family. We had a great time, very relaxing and all work thoughts switched off. Then ... I came back to drowning in a sea of GitHub notifications, so excuse me while I try wade through a month's notifications and respond to what needs to be responded to.

Meetings

1. Merge Tuesdays: I always enjoy these meetings. Delighted this month to have a new features for responsive tables released for LocalGov Base. And we also merged a PR to remove lots of words from our URL aliases for new sites.
2. Tech Group Drop-ins: One of these in particular was very interesting, when Bob from SRS Wales came along and instigated a discussion about security. You can read the extensive notes we kept from this. Another really interesting session we had was debugging facets issue with Northumberland Council where facets were working fine in the base theme but not working in the custom theme. Always good fun to work our way through these tricky things.
3. Tech Governance: These meetings are always an eye-opening in how much effort it takes to run a successful open source community. We spent a lot of time this month discussing supporting more than one version of the base theme at a time (for example when we introduce breaking changes such as moving from flexbox to grid).
4. Community Meetup: Interesting one this month. Was great to see my work building the Irish Council Planning Notices module being demonstrated.

Code Contributions

1. I couldn't help myself. Tim in Tipperary County Council made a really cool module for reporting blight in your area by pulling in data from Met.ie. I couldn't help myself from doing a little bit of tidying up and refactoring so the module is easier to install. And then some more refactoring, and then even more refactoring.
2. It turns out LocalGov Scarfolk has a missing dependency on LocalGov Base if trying to install it on its own. But now there's a PR to fix that.
3. Something I really enjoy is reviewing and refactoring code. Our elections module is very powerful, but much of the JavaScript in the module did not follow Drupal's coding standards. So I wrote a PR to rewrite it.
4. I had written a version of a module a number of months back to allow content editors to clone content, with the Replicate module being the base for my work. We decided a few weeks ago that we would use the Replicate UI module as the base instead, so we would then have very little custom code to maintain. So I spent some time removing the code from my original writing of the module and re-wrote the module to use Replicate/Replicate UI as the base.
5. In an effort to get this module to a 1.0.0 state for an official release, I also wrote a suite of tests for it. Hopefully we'll get those merged soon and the 1.0.0 release made. Update: Reader, it's merged!
6. And then we moved the project to Drupal.org, so it's one less module we will need to move there when we migrate all projects there.
7. And now I need to check if the module works for the Microsites Platform, and if not to create a submodule that will sort that out.
8. I was doing some training sessions with Islington Borough Council recently, and they wanted to see an example of a Drupal module that makes API calls to an external resource. I thought the module I started work on recently for Netcall Converse Queue Data would be a good candidate for this. But the bonus was that I also did some work to refactor the module and use a service and dependency injection to connect to the Netcall API instead of placing this in the .module file.
9. I rewrote our Grid system recently and am now making a push to use the same system for our other templates that were not part of the original rewrite. E.G. layout paragraph templates use a template from Stable9, but that uses it's own system. To try to have better consistency, I created an issue to get some traction for this, and now have also create a PR to make some movement on it.

Bonus

I had some very nice mentoring sessions/Slack chats with the good folk of North Yorkshire County Council. They are trying to ensure their website is as accessible as possible so we had some chats about the cookies page and overflowing tables on small screens. Which is now fixed from a PR we merged to LocalGov Base.

And then I did the same with some of the Northumberland devs, to try figure out why a Twig Tweak function wouldn't embed a directory search block in a template.

I really enjoy hopping on these quick calls to sort out an issue for a council or agency, whether they are a client or not.

Filed Under:

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