Published: September 30, 2025
My LocalGov Drupal contributions for September 2025
A good amount of contributions made this month, including getting LocalGov Replicate into a stable state.

Code Contributions
- We have had a number of councils ask for LocalGov Guides to be added to the Microsites Platform. I now have a PR to add the LocalGov Guides module to Microsites. And then a second PR to configure LocalGov Guides to work with microsites - this is done via a submodule in the LocalGov Microsites Group module.
- And after that, I did the same for Step-by-Step content types.
- And after that, I did the same for Publications content types.
- But that threw up an issue whereby we can't install Publications in Microsites because it has a dependency on LocalGov Services, which doesn't exist in Microsites. So I fixed it.
- In our efforts to make our LGD sites more and more (and more and more) accessible, we have a proposal to add the Drupal Editoria11y module to our CMS. I have a new "LocalGov Editoria11y" module created and added to Drupal.org which downloads the Editorially module and configures the permissions for it. I have a second PR to add this new module to our LocalGov Drupal.
- Last month I was working on some editor experience issues. One of the PRs I created was to change the "Description" tab for LocalGov Services to "Content". When complete, our tests showed that we have lots of failing tests in LocalGov Services, especially JavaScript and CSS coding standards. Great, says I to myself, that's an easy fix. But then ... I ended up needing to rewrite all the JS for LocalGov Services to remove the jQuery and use ES6+ JS instead, and then fix the coding standards. But it's great to have these larger refactors done now, or else we'll have to do them later.
- And then I sorted all the coding standards issues with the CSS for LocalGov Services. So now we're a few steps closer to getting our automated tests to pass.
- Maria noticed an inconsistency with our prev/next component not rendering the node titles for Step-by-Step navigation. So I created a PR to fix that.
- I created an issue about a year ago to allow some CSS variables to be set via the theme settings page for our themes. I finally got around to working on this and now have a PR ready for accent colour, line height, and base spacing. Then I took it one step further and extended the Colour Picker Fields module we have for microsites, so now we have a generic module for that. And then I went a step further and created the LocalGov Base feature as a submodule, so you can decide for example to not turn it on for microsites. And then I went a step even further to propose microsites should start using the more generic module as its base. And then my brain went all a bit mushy!!!
- When my head stopped being mushy, I had the bright idea to add a textarea to the theme settings so that we could add arbitrary CSS to a theme. I hope no one ships this CSS to production, but it might be handy during dev, especially in the year days before you have a sub-theme created. Here's the PR, get the popcorn!
- Last month we released a new feature to use the name of the document instead of the file name when embedding documents via media. This through up an issue with files uploaded via webform, which Andy fixed, but then it through up another issue with files added via node file fields, which I fixed.
- That last (node) issue was noticed when working on the Irish Planning Notices module. We also noticed that the default year for planning notices is set to 2023, so I created a PR to increase that to 2025.
- Then I thought, why not create a view to list each year up to 2030. So I created a PR for that.
- The LocalGov Replicate module is ready for a 1.0.0. release (and thus security team coverage), but is just waiting on an updated README. It now has an updated README. And it now has a 1.0.0 release!
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