The LocalGov Drupal microsites team have had three successful sprints and here’s the lowdown on their progress. For the full details, click on the sprint name to go to the sprint notes.
Sprint 5
First, they organised user-testing recommendations. During testing, they saw where the UI wasn't intuitive. The team tackled which fields/interfaces needed distracting and text. They also deleted unnecessary fields and menu items to tidy up.
Some proposals seemed quick and straightforward to implement, but others, like evaluating site design, must be balanced against other large items on the plan.
Features
Furthermore, they decided which backlog features to develop. News, events, and directories. They chose directories as a large feature to solve difficult difficulties.
Directories
Stephen made great progress distributing directories despite a lack of team members. Directories are a core component of LocalGov Drupal, so they thought they'd be a wonderful complement to microsites. Watch this space for more news about directories.
Front end improvements
Some styling review was done and the microsite now has a fresher look.
This included work on the default styling for better accessibility.
Sprint 6
In this sprint, the team turned their attention to automated testing.
Thought LocalGov Drupal microsites have a separate distribution and installation profile to LocalGov Drupal, they share many modules. Meaning the team only had to test some modules against either one or two installation profiles.
Directories
The majority of the work on directories was done in Sprint 5, and so this time the team focused on writing some automated tests and merged these. Now the default install comes with directory features.
Autosave
Content editors will rejoice at the addition of an autosave function.
More styling
The team introduced a greater depth of styling options for the header and footer sections. Plus, an admin now has more control over presets for teaser images. Additionally, designers now have more freedom to manipulate the width of layout paragraph containers.
What’s more, the ability to preview content is now available.
Path aliases per microsite
Props to Eke who skillfully created a means of avoiding Drupal’s preference to have unique path aliases, when the same nodes are required on microsite 1 and 2. This will lead into further work on automated aliases.
Sprint 7
With a few minor adjustments to enable them to function with groups, directories, events, and news have succeeded in becoming part of microsites in their original form.
Promoted directory page
Allowing a "fancy" page with multiple columns and a variety of paragraph types to appear in the directory for brochure-like pages that can still be kept in a directory This is especially helpful for directories of items that need to be highlighted, such as gallery exhibits, markets, etc.
News and Events
The LocalGov Drupal project's cornerstones have joined microsites. They will be expanded to support more rich content than they already do.
Drop-down menu
Now, all menus will have a responsive, usable dropdown menu option.
In order to give microsite administrators more flexibility, more UI fields have been added to the "Site Design" tab.
The major paragraph shift
A fundamental underlying architectural principle has been to keep everything as modular as possible. The team no longer wanted to set up subsites to use the same paragraphs on microsites. So they separated the paragraphs used in subsites into their own module.
Coming up…
A small spoiler: while the team is on vacation in August, the team will conduct another round of user testing. More on this when we know!
We're still offering a free trial of LocalGov Drupal on AWS