Published: July 8, 2024
Want to contribute to LocalGov Drupal, but don't know where to start?
Contributing to LocalGov Drupal is a great way to get used to how the platform works, and, in turn, makes the platform better for everyone. Here's some thoughts on how to get started.
Thanks to Big Blue Door for sponsoring my time to work on LocalGov Drupal.
Ideas to get started
Contribute what you want
I think the first thing to think about when contributing to LocalGov Drupal - indeed to any open source project - is to contribute what you want to contribute. We are always open to see what someone wants to contribute, and it might be a great idea we haven't thought of ourselves. If it's suitable, we'll accept it or ask for some modifications to bring it into line with our standards. If it's not something we are interested in, at least you have gained that knowledge too.
As an organisation, consider being a stakeholder of an initiative
All agencies have specialties. If yours is accessibility, have a look and see what accessibility needs LocalGov Drupal has. If you speciality is performance, perhaps do an audit of hour our sites fare, and suggest improvements. If your speciality is something else, figure out where we are falling short of your high standards in this area and help us make it better.
Perhaps you'd like to become known as "the agency" that does X in LocalGov Drupal. Be that agency and take a vested interest in a feature - blogs, directories, news ... whatever. It's always handy if someone has a question for us to be able to say "go chat with [your agency name here] about that".
If you are feeling really adventurous, you could propose a whole new feature for LGD and if it's a good idea, go build it. That's how I got started, I proposed a re-write of the entire frontend of LocalGov Drupal.
Ask questions
Instead of looking to contribute something specific, how about you hop on to the Slack and just ask questions for things you need to know about LGD. Then when you get answers, use that information to add to the documentation to benefit everyone. Or create tutorials and videos to show off what you now know.
Check the roadmap
We have a roadmap of activities on the LocalGov Drupal website. Have a look at it to get an idea for where we are going in the coming months and see where you can be of help.
Come to a meeting
We have lots of meetings. Come to some, learn, ask questions. After a few of these you should have lots of ideas for ways to help us out.
- Merge Tuesday to you know what new features have been released
- Tech group drop-in to ask any technical questions you might have
- Tech group governance to find out about who is maintaining what
- Content group to learn about how council content designers are using the platform
- Product group to see what we are working on
- And many more
Ideas for specific skills
Developers
We have two bookmarks on the technical group Slack channel
These are two great places to get started. Someone has already done the work, but we are always stuck for people to help out reviewing it before it can be merged.
Frontend Developers
Have a check on the LocalGov Base repo. That's our main frontend repo.
Following that, have a look at the LocalGov Microsites Base repo. That's the main base theme for microsites. There's a few niggling issues there about the menu system (especially for multi-level menus).
LocalGov Claro is our base admin theme. I really like it, and there's very few issues, but I'm sure it could be better.
Backend Developers
The main bulk of our project is backend work. Check any of the repos issues and there should be something for you - Guides, Step-by-Steps, Services, Directories, etc.
Content People
Documentation can always be better. have a look at our docs site and see what's missing. For example, if you look at the Designers page on the documentation, you'll see we have a link to news wireframes that links to a private PenPot. It would be good to find out if we can get an image of the wireframes and add them to the docs site.
Hopefully those ideas will spark your imagination and I'll see you soon contributing as much as possible to this great public resource.