My LocalGov Drupal contributions for week-ending September 27th, 2024

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Meetings and Meet-ups

1. Merge Tuesday: We had a monster mash of reviewing and merging LocalGov Base code after all the PRs I got created yesterday. I love seeing issues being created, fixed, and merged so quickly.
2. Product Group meet-up: So many cool things coming up in LGD. Today we talked a lot about our on-going "Editor experience" mission.

Code Contributions

1. My old friend Paul McCrodden has just joined us and is starting to help us out with some of the issues on GitHub. It was great to spend some time getting him up to speed and doing general mentoring work to find issues for him to work on.
2. Having spent all of last week working on the LocalGov Live Preview module, my GitHub notifications were well-amassed this week, so lots of time was spent on issue triaging and responding to comments/issues/PRs.
3. We had been printing the navigation for step-by-steps and guides in our print.css. Jonny reckoned we should not be printing these items and created an issue for it. I agreed with him, so created a PR to remove them from the print stylesheet.
4. Maria created an issue to let me know that when you create a blockquote via the WYSIWYG, there is no styling added to it so people may not know it is a quote. This seems like something easy to fix, except we also have a "Pull Out Quote" component which creates a blockquote and that does have CSS for it. The conundrum is then how do we style general blockquotes, without affecting our pull out quotes? I think I got a pretty-elegant solution.
5. Another tricky accessibility issue was created by Lauri, saying that the quick fact component does not have a proper semantic hierarchy. This showed up two issues for me - I'm not sure what any particular item in the quick fact component should have for it's semantic element besides p and we thought we were printing the main content of it in a p but weren't. We now have a PR to fix that, but I feel we might need more discussion to figure out if a more specific element would be more appropriate.
6. Some of our JS code was written at a time when we were explicitely supporting IE11. We have moved on from explicit support to "let's not intentionally break it" support, so I'd like to start getting our transpilers and *.es6.js files removed. This will mean we'll serve more modern JS but also mean it will be a lot easier for people to contribute to the project since they won't have to get set up with transpilers and polyfills. Here's a PR to show what I mean for LocalGov Alert Banner module.
7. The "View map" link on service landing pages opens in a new tab, which can be disorientating for people, especially screenreader and assistive technology users. Maria created an issue for this, and I created a PR for screenreaders to announce that it is an external link and also that it opens in a new tab.
8. We got the large PR to add a sticky header feature to LocalGov Base merged at last, and also a corresponding PR in LocalGov Core to enable a LocalGov Base helper module, but after that we realised we need to come up with a similar strategy for LocalGov Microsites. So ... that's thrown a spanner in the works. Hopefully a PR for LocalGov Microsites Group module will suffice to fix this issue.
9. Our step-by-step pages show sighted users which step is the current step in the sidebar navigation. However, we don't give the same affordance to non-sighted and screen reader users. Well, we used to not, but now we do!

Filed Under:

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