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LocalGov Drupal Beta Sprint 7 Notes

Sprint 7 was the first sprint after a four week break and a number of the team were away on annual leave, so the throughput of work was perhaps understandably a bit lower than previous sprints. 

With that said, progress was made on a number of fronts, with a heavy focus was documentation and onboarding.

Onboarding discovery

We have been increasingly aware of the need for appropriate onboarding for new councils. What is needed will inevitably vary from council to council and is perhaps best targeted to specific personas such as developers, product managers, content designers. 

As part of the sprint, we had the opportunity to run two onboarding sessions, one for content designers and one for developers, and to use these sessions as some 'onboarding discovery' to begin to assess what works best for councils coming aboard.

Onboarding for content designers

Ben Hills-Jones has worked extensively with the LocalGov Drupal content types at Croydon Council and more recently Cumbria Council. He has contributed to the project in a number of ways, including sharing fairly extensive documentation on how and when to use each content type. The documentation he started continues to evolve on the docs site and formed the basis of a rapid introduction to the various type of content for a new council who are interested in joining the LocalGov Drupal project. On a video call with content designers and product managers from the council, Ben demonstrated various content types, including service landing pages and service pages, the step-by-step pages, the guide pages and the sub sites. 

This was really interesting, hearing Ben explain how he builds pages, why specific fields are how they are and some of the processes he follows when building out the content and information architecture of a council website.

Onboarding for developers

Our second hour of onboarding for the new council was for the developers. Ekes and I led this one, sharing my screen and running through the basics of cloning the codebase, using composer to install the codebase, starting lando to run local development environment with docker, installing the site with drush and enabling the localgov_demo module. 

I then demonstrated the neat script that Mark created to generate a sub theme and showed the team around the child theme.

This time we rapidly moved on to questions, which covered:

  • how composer is used to manage code,
  • how development might work with Lando and Docker on Windows,
  • exploring the tooling within Lando such as phpcs and phpunit,
  • how security updates are managed with composer in a distribution,
  • how new feature updates are consumed by councils,
  • how the semantic versioning works with updates,
  • considerations for extending the system with new functionality,
  • how the collaboration works in practice.

All in all this felt like a valuable hour with lots of questions and discussion and hopefully brought the developers at the council more on board to enable further exploration. 

 

 

Onboarding with council developers
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