Published: July 4, 2024
My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending July 5th, 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.
Meetings and Meet-ups
- Merge Tuesday. We got enough merged today to - hopefully - have a stable release of LocalGov Elections this afternoon. Then we had a very deep conversation a patch failure for LocalGov Services that is stopping councils from upgrading to Drupal 10.3.
- Tech Group Drop-in. We worked on clearing the last stable blockers for the LocalGov Elections module. We succeeded and tagged a 1.0.0 release.
Code Contributions
- I rewrote part of my PR to change the title structure of elections results pages, to make sure some views pages didn't break when trying to access the results.
- We have a number of dev and beta modules in the LocalGov Elections suite, so I spent some time testing the latest stable versions of these to see could we remove the dev versions - we could!
- The results timeline feature is proving to be a tricky piece of work to get right, so we have decided we don't need it for the upcoming elections, but that it will be very handy for the local elections. I created a PR to remove it for now.
- We have a checkbox to turn off the number of votes needed for a majority - since it's not needed on some election types - but some people were skipping it by accident. We have now a PR to ensure that the setting is always false when viewing a national parliamentary election, such as the on e in the UK this week.
- And then we decided that wasn't the approach we wanted to take, so we now have another PR to simply set that field as off by default instead.
- I'm a big fan of consistency and separating concerns, so it's always frustrated me that we use the same view mode in LocalGov Drupal for our teaser listings (e.g. news listing) and our card listings (e.g. featured news items). Why not have a consistent way of styling cards and a separate consistent way of styling teasers (and other view modes). So now we have a PR to do just that - add a card view mode to LocalGov Drupal. It even has an update hook so all LGD sites can take the same approach.
- We had a PR to add the "Compare revisions" button to the top of the page (as well as the bottom) but it seems the maintainers of the Diff module have implemented it already so we don't need to. I then updated my PR to make the button sticky at the top of pages when you scroll which is helpful if there's been a lot of revisions and you can't see the top or bottom of the list on your screen.
- Tests are very important to the LGD team, we try to have as much test-coverage as possible. I hadn't realised, but our LocalGov Claro theme didn't have any tests, so I created a PR to add our default theme test suite to it.
- Sticky headers are a common feature on websites - always sticky, or sticky when you scroll back up the page, etc - so why not create that feature for LocalGov Base so we have it available for all councils if they want it. I started work on that this week, but it tricky to get config updates into themes since they don't have a .install file. I've now also started a LocalGov Base Supports module to solve this. Hopefully I'll get it finished next week.