My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending July 12th, 2024

Meetings and Meet-ups

1. Merge Tuesday. As usual, lots of things got merged, then we got down to a very interesting discussion about managing external libraries in our repos, based on the PR I have for bulk adding media items to our sites. We also got the cool new "Add to calendar" feature merged to LocalGov Base, which has been asked for for a long time by content designers.
2. Content Group. We had a really interesting content group meeting this week, going through the documentation initiative for LocalGov Drupal.

I worked on two large issues this week: adding sticky header feature for LocalGov Base theme and creating a base theme for NHS websites. Let's see how it all unfolded.

Code Contributions

1. I started working on an issue to add a sticky header feature for LocalGov Base. We have an idea in LocalGov Drupal that says "Make the hard stuff easy". A sticky header is a really good example of this, it's not easy to figure it out because of all the bits and pieces that can get in the way - are there items above the header, below the header, etc? Do items in the header affect it? Will it break existing websites? I spend most of Monday figuring out this in a way that can work for all councils. It's not perfect yet, but it a very good start for us, and comes as part of the LocalGov Base theme settings so any subtheme of this can inherit it.
2. We are getting a backlog of open pull requests that need to be reviewed or have been approved but not merged. I spend time reviewing lots of PRs so we could merge as many as possible at Merge Tuesday.
3. Everyone wants to help LocalGov, but not everyone knows where to start. So I wrote a blog post to help you get started.
4. When you use the theme generation script in localgov_base, the subtheme that is created sets itself as compatible with Drupal 8, Drupal 9, and Drupal 10. I fixed that so now our subthemes are compatible with Drupal 10 and Drupal 11.
5. If you use the linter script we created so your theme's CSS will follow Drupal's coding standards, we ship a .nvmrc file with it which stipulates Node 16 as our approved version. However, Node 16 is no longer supported, so I now have a PR created to set Node 20 as our approved version of Node, which is the current LTS version.
6. The BIG one: there's been a lot of talk recently about using LocalGov Drupal for NHS trusts and other NHS sites. So, I went and started work on a base theme for the NHS.

Filed Under:

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