LocalGov Drupal Dev Days

aria-label is overused and often the wrong choice. This short talk examines when to use aria-label, aria-labelledby, aria-describedby, visually-hidden text, or native HTML labels—and why it matters. 

We'll review real examples from LocalGov Drupal Base theme where labelling choices impact screen reader users, explore the accessibility testing that reveals these issues, and establish practical decision-making criteria for developers. 

The goal: improve how we implement accessible labels across LocalGov Drupal contrib and help you make better choices in your own projects. Expect concrete code examples, discussion about common pitfalls, and an invitation to review LocalGov Base's current patterns together.

"Explore techniques to ensure uptime and that pages are delivered fast

We'll demonstrate some of the approaches and challenges involved in maintaining uptime and performance of Localgov Drupal websites. This includes lessons learned from live deployments across our multiple council web hosting customers such as Bracknell Forest, Bath and North East Somerset and Wirral.

Discussion to include:

• Baseline production Drupal configuration
• Implementation of reverse proxy caching and content delivery networks - our experience with Fastly CDN, and cost/benefit analysis
• How to measure - performance and uptime monitoring and metrics
• Methods we've employed to deal with aggressive bot crawling - (particularly an issue with Localgov Directories) and other emerging threats from the AI ecosystem
• Scalable architectures for dealing with high traffic periods such as elections.
• Security against attacks such as DDoS, and origin server protection"

Councils manage hundreds of multi-step processes daily—licensing, permits, service requests—each requiring conditional logic, variable pricing, and payment integration. 

Walsall Council wanted these workflows in-house, not farmed out to external systems. 

This case study explores how we built complex transactional processes using LocalGov Drupal and contrib modules (Webform, Commerce, Group). We'll walk through real requirements: dynamic price books, multi-stage data capture, conditional form logic, and payment workflows. 

Expect honest discussion about where standard LocalGov Drupal components fell short, the site-building solutions we developed to bridge those gaps, and the architectural decisions that made it work. Useful for anyone tackling form-heavy council processes.

LGD Microsite provides an efficient way to create multiple microsite with their own theming through config, however, for obvious reasons there are limitations.

Combining the Drupal sub-theming inheritance, library system and Vite, the path to create multiple theme with minimal variations between the themes become easier.

The session will show how a developer can leverage some of the best tools available to:
1) simplify the theme development in a LGD Microsites environment (but actually usable on other context as well)
2) Enforce extendability and reusability