Published: July 18, 2024
My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending July 19th, 2024
Here's what I've been working on for my LocalGov Drupal contributions this week. Thanks to Big Blue Door for sponsoring the time to work on these.
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I'm wrecked after all the work this week, but in a good way! Another really enjoyable week making LocalGov Drupal better for everyone. I'm particularly excited about the module I started working on that will allow site users to navigate their LGD backends via keyboard shortcuts. Can't wait to work on that more in the coming weeks.
Need LocalGov Drupal services? Give Big Blue Door a shout.
Meetings and Meet-ups
- Merge Tuesday. Docs got a good looking at in this week's Merge Tuesday. It's always good to make a documentation better. We also had a nice merge of demo content for publications, and started looking at a template for PRs so when you create one the reviewers will have a better idea of what is happening.
- Netcall/LGD working group: We had a good look through connecting the Netcall call center data with a Drupal website, so content designers can see what the most popular items people are calling about and target content towards this.
- Community Meet-up: I always enjoy this to see what else people are working on and what features people want us to work on. This week I gave a presentation on the upcoming features for Drupal 11.
- Tech Group drop-in: Well this week's meet-up certainly got down to details. We talked about using migrate module to pull data in to your website on a continuous basis. We also talked about creating a glossary of terms for a jargon buster. And we finished off talking about how to create events.
Code Contributions
- I usually spend a decent amount of time in Slack each week, helping out any one who posts an issue there, so they have a good "customer experience" from LGD and get their issues solved quickly. This week this led to me creating an issue to fix our accordions when printing. Since only 1 accordion opens at a time, you can't see all the closed ones if you print the page. Well, you can now.
- Given the backlog of PRs we now have since we have more people working on issues, I spent a good amount of time again this week reviewing what I could so we could get more items merged. I'm trying to spend about 2 hours per week on this task to keep the number of open PRs as low as possible.
- I got some more work done on the NHS base theme, specifically the breadcrumbs area, background color for the body element and the screenshot used when selecting a theme.
- We've had an issue open to create an admin role for LocalGov Drupal since late April. We have a PR for this to add an admin role to new LGD sites, now we have a second PR adding a module which will allow existing sites to have an admin role as well if they want it. This approach will, then, allow us to use this module to apply any updates that we might want to the admin role.
- After all my hard work getting a sticky header working in LocalGov Base, Maria's eagle eyes noticed that I was applying the same JS/CSS to the sticky version as I was to the scrolly version. And with minutes to go before Merge Tuesday ... we got it fixed.
- I created an experimental module to allow us to navigate a LGD website via keyboard shortcuts. There's a blog post and video to explain it, and the code is available on GitHub. Next up: create a mechanism for it to work with all admin menu URLs. Then ... create a settings page so councils can create their own shortcuts. This really excites me!