Published: November 15, 2024
My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending November 15th, 2024
LocalGov Drupal week + code contributions + getting elected on to the board of Open Digital Cooperative. It's been a busy week.
Need LocalGov Drupal services? Give Big Blue Door a shout.
Meetings and Meet-ups
- Tech Group Drop-in: All the talk today was about setting up load balancers, LocalGov Finders, and JavaScript.
- Tech Group Governance: A very detailed chat about moving to Drupal.org and how we can use the credits system to amplify organisations and individuals who are doing outstanding work.
LocalGov Drupal Week
This week was all about LocalGov Drupal week.
In the session "Taking LocalGov Drupal to the next level", I was giving a demo of three the things I had been building recently, based on funding from Big Blue Door. They were:
- Live Previews for Microsites
- KeyNav Module
- App to test multiple URLs simultaneously with Axe Core
I also spent some time Monday morning preparing for the LGD + Netcall integrations presentation. I was responsible for the section on integrating Netcall's AI Widgets into Drupal and showing how you can add different AI widgets to different pages on your site.
Code Contributions
- Let's start off with a simple one. Chris created an issue in the elections module to let us know that the link provided to check ONS wards info had changed. So I hunted down the new link and created a PR to fix the issue. Let's hope the rest of the issues are as easy to fix this week.
- We've had an issue open for quite a while to improve the CSS for our tables. This is a bit tricky because it's hard to define what "improve" means (generally, we want table to be responsive on small screens), but also we don't know how tables are going to be inserted to our sites (wysiwyg, views, custom markup, etc) and don't know where they are going to appear (header, footer, blog post, sidebar, etc). One thing I do know is we have a "Table Field" module, so that definitely one place that tables will be inserted and I know they'll turn up then in the main body of a piece of content. So I created some CSS to at least have those tables get some horizontal scroll on small screens. It took a while to figure out the CSS as the demo tables are inside our layout containers, and it was these higher up elements that were forcing the tables to be wider than they should have been.
- I came back to an old battle of mine: add a parent field to the election content type. This will then allow us to place elections in whatever hierarchy of our sites we want to. I had a PR that added a custom field for parents, but we decided a few weeks at at a Merge Tuesday meeting that we'd use the "Services Parent" field instead, following the same pattern as LocalGov Directories. I have a PR ready for this now, but it is having a small issue with trying to use "Autocomplete Deluxe" instead of "Autocomplete". We'll get there.
- We got the "Convert CSS to use Logical Properties" PR merged, which I'm delighted with. Now all our CSS in LocalGov Base is using logical properties, which will mean less code to maintain and ensure our CSS is all fully-ready for any multilingual designs you can throw at it. Woo Hoo!
- Let's keep making things more accessible. Maria posted an issue to say the contrast between the background colour of the sidebar and the inputs for search/date/etc in the sidebar wasn't enough. We have a tiny PR to fix that now.
- I tackled the monster issue - start moving our components to use Single-Directory Components. This will be a great step towards making our design system truly componentised, but it's a tricky one to get started on when you have to consider the hundreds of sites already using our current way of doing things. Thanks to Christopher for leading on this. I think the PR is almost ready to merge.
- Now that we have our all CSS using logical properties, I was able to do a second sweep of the codebase to tidy up the CSS, so any property that had, for example,
margin-leftandmargin-rightboth set to the same value on a class now hasmargin-inlineset to that value instead. This is part of an initiative to have as nice small codebase that is easy to maintain but that is also less stress on the environment. - Karl at Sheffield County Council was having some issues with permissions for his news editors. So I hopped on a call and sorted him out. I love these impromptu helping sessions that unblock people very quickly.
- I don't have a number 9, but I have big news for Number 10 ...
- I've just been voted on to the board of directors of Open Digital Cooperative, the custodians of LocalGov Drupal. I'll write a fuller blog post about this issue soon.