My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending August 30th, 2024

Need LocalGov Drupal services? Give Big Blue Door a shout.

Having spent most of last week's time working on the new LocalGov Drupal Dashboard, I had a bit of a backlog of issues, PR, notifications, etc on GitHub to read through, respond to, update. Not the most glamourous part of open source development, but you need to keep on top of the repos you are the maintainer for. And then ... a gem pops up. Christopher proposed a new module, built it, and put it on GitHub for us to review. The module is a jobs listings portal, something we probably should have built before now, but it's never too late.

Meetings and Meet-ups

1. Merge Tuesday: We spent most of the MT time reviewing the 13 PRs I opened for the $is_syncing issue that I spent half of Monday working on.
2. Tech Group Drop-in: This was a really juicy meeting this week, discussing Big Pipe/Cachability/Empty Regions/Supported CSS ... and some other items that were a little less taxing on the brain.

Code Contributions

1. We have much better tabbing order now for keyboard users when tabbing from the services menu toggle to the services menu. Now when you get to the last item and click tab, it will tab back to the main menu area. Previously it was tabbing to the main content area. Better accessibility is better for everyone.
2. Sticking with the theme of accessibility, Maria posted an issue demonstrating that headings in the footer regions were black on a dark grey background, failing contrast conformity for WCAG guidelines. So I created a PR to add variables for headings in footer regions, and we can then easily set these in our variables.css files for --color-pre-footer-heading, --color-footer-heading, and --color-post-footer-heading.
3. Sometimes reviewing PRs is fun, for example when you get a MEGA pull request to update the docs site from VuePress 1 to VuePress 2. Thanks to Lee for creating this PR, it's not one I was relishing creating. 🙂
4. Keelan opened an accessibility issue over a year ago where JAWS screenreader was reading out the decorative ">" symbol in our start buttons. We couldn't reliably reproduce/fix it at the time, but thanks to the nifty new CSS "alt text" property for the CSS "content" attribute, we now can. I created a PR for it, hopefully that's one more accessibility fix we'll have in our codebase soon.
5. We've had an issue pop up a few times recently with config being imported and install hooks being run at the same time causing issues. We figured out it's because we are not sufficiently checking to see if config is being imported before we do our manipulations. Stephen created an issue for this, and then I created 13 pull requests to fix the issue everywhere it might arise. This was quite boring, but necessary.
6. Erik posted a whopper of an issue, in great detail, showing some shortcomings we have in LocalGov base for trying to detect if a region is empty or not before we render it. We're using the same approach we created for the Umami theme in Drupal core, but no matter what you do something has to give - either we lose caching on some blocks, or we lose the ability to use Big Pipe on others, etc. I'm not sure exactly how we'll solve this, but I'm really looking forward to the conversation. Perhaps you can jump in to it too here.
7. I've been making some moves to try standardise some of our components. The first I've been tackling is our "Previous/Next" component. We use the same thing on blogs, step-by-steps, etc but have different templates for them all. I have a number of them now using the same template. Thanks to Christopher for creating a PR to add publications prev/next to the list, which I reviewed and merged.

Filed Under:

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