My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending October 18th, 2024

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Meetings and Meet-ups

1. Merge Tuesday: We got the 1.8 branch of Alert Banner merged and released. This is a great news, as it's a rewrite of the Alert Banner module using more modern Drupal paradigms (and has lots of modern JS in it, which makes my frontend heart happy).
2. Quality Metrics: We had a really energising meeting about the metrics modules that are available for Drupal that we would could look at making available in LocalGov Drupal - such as reading age, broken links, spell checker, etc.
3. Tech Group Drop-in: Lots of talk about options for image carousels for LocalGov Microsites.
4. Netcall Working Group: We demoed the work I have been doing on the Netcall AI Widget module and started mapping out a process to bring Netcall data directly into your LGD website.
5. Community Meetup: Lots of good news this month in the LGD community - website launches, new events channels, and I got to demo 3 things I have been working on:
   1. LocalGov Replicate module
   2. LocalGov KeyNav module
   3. Netcall AI Widget module
6. Global Open Source Gov Community: This was the first meeting of an initiative to build a community of open source government organisations. We had people attend from Mexico, Canada, Greece, Columbia, Switzerland ... the full spectrum. I hope this takes off.

Code Contributions

1. I built an integration for the Netcall AI Widget a while ago. Last week LGD got access to our own ConverseCX instance, so I can test it properly. However, I needed to build some AI Widgets first to test, which was fun and an interesting learning experience. I'm pretty amazed at how powerful the whole Netcall suite is and looking forward to writing more integrations for it. And I'm delighted to report that after a little bit of trial and error, I was able to properly test my module and we now have ... a process to show different AI Widgets on different pages, including a general widget as a catch all for all pages not showing specific widgets.
2. Our Alert Banner module has a JavaScript file that uses jQuery instead of modern JS. That's been on my mind for a while to get rewritten. Now that we are almost ready for a new version of the LocalGov Alert Banner module, I got the chance to create a PR to remove the jQuery, but also modernise the JS with Drupal Behaviours and once, etc while I was at it.
3. Councils often ask for their facets on directories to not submit/refresh the page until users have finished selecting all the facets they want. To achieve this Andy and Adnan worked on getting the Drupal Facets Forms module working with our facets. Then they created an issue so the frontend of it would play nicely, so I created a PR for that issue. And now everyone is able to sleep soundly!
4. I want to start rewriting our CSS to use logical properties, so we have less to maintain and we send less to the server. That's good for developer ergonomics and also good for the environment. To get this started, I rewrote the css for fields.css and created a PR for it. Once merged, I'll rewrite the rest of the codebase.
5. Our Events template in LocalGov Microsites Base uses a full copy of the LocalGov Base event template just to add a block for the breadcrumbs. However, this means if we make any updates to the LocalGov Base template, the LocalGov Microsites Base template will not avail of them. To get around this, I created a PR in LocalGov Base to add a Twig block for the breadcrumbs so then I could create a follow-up PR for LocalGov Microsites Base to extend from the LocalGov Base theme and just use the Twig block to inject the breadcrumbs.

Filed Under:

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